I was thinking the other day about the amount of form spam that most web sites get (and again just now as I moderated a ton of blog comments), and I was reminded of a proof of concept I saw a while back. It required the user to utilize drag and drop functionality to submit a form, thus verifying human interaction. Then I thought of the iPhone’s unlock function and how it would make a cool CAPTCHA.

I’ve written a handy JavaScript class for including these types of sliders into a web site- stick around after the break for more details and cool configuration options.

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I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.

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I was reading a couple of my favorite blogs recently and I saw a few examples of what is starting to become commonplace among the blogging community. Whether it’s somebody trying to find an obscure painting, or a well-known software firm attempting to secure an advertising contract, it’s become fairly common to see people trying to get something done via a blog post.

While it immediately struck me as somewhat lazy to outsource these tasks to your readers, I realized rather quickly that it makes a ton of sense. I’m sure that Jason at 37 Signals did his research trying to find the best marketing firm, but he’s limited to the resources of one or a few people. And I’m sure that Anthony scoured the web and Google images to try and find his painting to no avail. BEFORE they posted. But I guess that’s one of the good things about being a high-profile blog (that’s right I consider vdov high-profile) – you have the kind of distribution that makes doing something like this on your own almost selling yourself short.

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Today at work, our marketing team rolled out the web site for our new product, Email Center Pro. The service is still in private beta mode, but the thought is the new site will start to pick up organic search traffic, and by the time we launch publicly in the next few weeks, the site will start off with decent search results.

To those small business owners out there, keep your eyes peeled as we go public with the new service. Palo Alto Software‘s latest offering will help you manage your customer service, informational, and other generic public-facing email. It’s group email management done the right way- check it out.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, me and my brother started a best-of-13 series of cribbage, but sadly I had to head home with with a 6-4 series lead. When he came by my place the following week to finish the match, we had to keep score using paper and pen. Since cribbage is essentially just a card game, I decided to create this iPhone cribbage scoreboard so cribbage lovers can pack a deck of cards and their iPhone and be all set to play a game.

The online cribbage board is located here: iPhone Cribbage Scoreboard. Read on for some instructions.

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Hey there! I added some photos today, so go ahead and check those out. Included are photos from this year’s wedding season, Duck football, and a few Halloween pictures among others. There’s even a picture of my brand new car! Hope the fall is treating everyone well, before we know it it will be time for my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. How bout those Ducks, #3 in the BCS. New Orleans, here we come!

if you’re like most americans, the most pressing question at hand these days is, “what has alex been up to in 2007.” unfortunately until recently, your #1 source for all things aboone has been seriously slacking (unlike the real aboone, of course). i have been planning a grand site update to take this site into the 21st century and beyond, so i was waiting for that before i updated my pictures; however, in reality it could be years before that happens, and a friend mentioned that the site was getting a little dated… so i spent a few hours getting the last 8 months worth of pics online for all you faithful readers out there [cue cricket sound effect]. check it out, i went to utah, cape cod, newport rhode island, and added some stuff from around here. oh, and those site updates are going to be sweet… just don’t hold your breath.

i just recently wrapped up work on a web site for the up and coming eugene jewelry designers, sahlia michelle jewelry designs. the site is entirely flash and is basically a gallery and online store right now. if you like what you see, and happen to be in the market for a web site… well, too bad, because this job has been a great refresher of the many reasons i don’t enjoy contract work. but i figured i’d give her a link here and see if we couldnt get a little organic traffic…

up until this point i’ve resisted the temptation of blogging about the iphone, simply because it’s been done to death lately everywhere else. yes, it is amazing and ridiculous and lacking in features here and there; this has already been blogged, twitttered and webcasted around the globe by now. but tonight i’m writing this blog (yes i am typing this on my phone no less) because i spent a decent amount of time setting up a system that ensures i’ll never need my laptop again. i’ve been amazed with the capabilities of the phone from a web browsing and email experience, not to mention entertainment, but until today my phone’s been lacking that killer app that rounds out my productivity needs: an SSH shell.
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one of the best things about being a web developer right now is the huge amount of resources available to help developers like me accomplish what it is we want to do. the amazon web services offerings are especially noteworthy. for the first time, infrastructural elements such as storage and processing power are now available as a service, and acquired on demand. this means that developers can leverage an essentially infinite pool of resources for absolutely zero fixed cost, but only pay for what is actually used. for many, bootstrapping an application is now a complete reality. at work recently, i’ve been building an application with a storage model based on amazon’s s3 (simple storage service). it’s been a wonderful experience so far, and everything’s been working great up until a few days ago. i just realized that this post is about to abruptly shift from a nice general overview to a incredibly specific level of detail, so to spare those less technical *cough (nerdy)* readers, the slightly amusing story and s3 troubleshooting tip is after the break.
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