In the past days I received several requests from my readers to suggest some CAPTCHA scripts and services quickly to embed into a web page. This post proposes a list of ten interesting scripts and services you can use to provide protection from spam bots and ensure that only humans perform certain actions.

1. reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free service which helps prevent automated abuse of your site (such as comment spam or bogus registrations) by using a CAPTCHA to ensure that only humans perform certain actions.

2. Securimage

Securimage is an open-source free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots. It can run on most any webserver as long as you have PHP installed, and GD support within PHP. Securimage does everything from generate complicated CAPTCHA images to making sure the code the user entered was correct.

3. WebSpamProtect

WebSpamProtect allows you to instantly add verification image (CAPTCHA) to your web site and protect your forms against spam robots. In order to protect your web form, this system requires that you install a small piece of code onto your web page. The code requires that your web site support PHP, Perl, ASP or ASP.NET. Basic plan is free but you can buy a Premium, Advanced or Professional paln with a little expense.

4. Cryptographp

Cryptographp is a PHP script for generate captchas. Cryptographp limit the robots bombarding spams and automating the forms: spaces members subscriptions, guestbooks, forums... This script is free and does not use any database. It is compatible with PHP >= 4.3.0. Cryptographp also exists into plugins for WordPress, wpMu for WordPress, Symfony and Guppy.

5. CAPTCHA-Service
captchas.net provides CAPTCHA images and audio files you can use in html-forms. To use this technology, your web pages have to be generated dynamically in any programming language PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, JSP, Ruby.

6. WP Captcha-Free

WP Captcha-Free blocks comment spam by using a combination of time-based hash (a.k.a. Time Based Tokens, TBT) and JavaScript (AJAX). When a comment is posted the plugin validates a hash based on time (and some other parameters). Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected. Unlike using a captcha, this does not place any burden on the commenter.

7. ProtectWebForm

ProtectWebForm is a service to add CAPTCHA images and audio files on your website. You have to create an account, generate your CAPTCHA type with all the desired parameters and include it on your web pages.You can also use it on your Wordpress template with this plugin.

8. ProtectWebForm
OpenCaptcha is a simple web service which requires no special configurations or modules. Basic installation is cut-and-paste, and requires no ability to program image manipuation scripts. New fonts, image algorithms, and distortions applied weekly.

9. Form-to-email script protected by Captcha

This form-to-email script is intended to collect data from an HTML form and send it to a specified email address using a CAPTCHA script to stop spam. It works with any kind of HTML form and you can use it multiple times on your pages.

10. freeCap
freeCap is a GPL CAPTCHA script to stop spam. It has been used on any form on any kind of website. It does require some knowledge of PHP to install, though there are several captcha plugins for forum and blog software listed below.

Any suggestion? Add a comment, thanks!

If you are looking for free resources to learn Ajax, PHP, CSS and JavaScript take a look at this collection with six interesting online presentations about these topics. The list includes a short introduction to Ajax, how to write modular CSS code, PHP Object Model fundamentals and an overview about the most popular JavaScript libraries.

1. Ajax 101 | Workshop
Author: Bill Scott | This presentation on SlideShare
Introduction to programming with Ajax. Covers XMLHttpRequest, XML, JSON, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Dom Scripting, Event Handling with some examples from YUI library.

2. Modular CSS
Author: Russ Weakley | This presentation on Slide Share
A clearly explained modular system that allows you to hide and show CSS rules to specific browsers without the need for extensive hacks or workarounds.

3. Understanding the PHP Object Model
Author: Sebastian Bergmann | This presentation on SlideShare
This talk will give an overview of PHP's object model, covering both basic OOP concepts such as interfaces, classes, and objects as well as PHP's “magic” interceptor methods.

5. jQuery in 15 minutes
Author: Simon | This presentation on SlideShare
A short introduction to jQuery in particular about functions, collections, grabbing values and chaining.

6. JavaScript Library Overview
Author: Jeresig | This presentation on SlideShare
An interesting Overview about the most popular JavaScript libraries (jquery, prototype, Scriptaculous...) for web designers.

In this post I want to suggest you five interesting and free spell checkers for HTML Forms (input and text area) ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some suggestions regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML and Javascript code. Try them!

Any suggestion about this topic? Please leave a comment, thanks!

1. Spellify

Spellify is a script.aculo.us based spell checker, released by Nikola Kocic, for form fields that utilizes Google as its spell check engine. Spellify can also be configured to different languages (refer to spellify.js for more information regarding language settings) and requires:

- PHP 4+ with CURL library installed (developed using PHP 4.4.6)
- script.aculo.us 1.8.0 (only effects.js and scriptaculous.js required)
- Prototype JavaScript Framework 1.6.0

To install Spellify on your pages add spellify.js, prototype.js and scriptaculous.js on the <head> tag of your page:

...and copy the HTML code you find in the step 3 of this page. Then add a form with some fields like these:

In this way, all fileds will be cheked while an user types a word into them. Spellify can also ignore a specific text field by setting its class attribute to spellify_ignore. For example, if you want to ignore the input field "city" use this code:

Take a look at the spellify official page for a live preview.

3. GoogieSpell

GoogieSpell is a Gmail like spell checker that you can use in your own web-application. It support for around 27 languages; well tested and works on IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7, FF 1.0+, Safari, Opera etc; generic, extendable and easy to install; AJAX based (without page-reloading; Lightweight (around 50 KB); Well documented and with GoogieSpell Multiple it's possible to spell check multiple text fields at once. Take a look here for the demo and for the code.

3. Ajax-Spell

Ajax-Spell is a useful spell checker for HTML text area which requires at least PHP 5 and either pspell or aspell. The only thing you have to do to work with ajax-spell is to include spell_checker.js and the MooTools javascript library in the tag <head> of your page and add the class spell_check to any textarea you want to have a spell checker added to.

For example, add mootools and spell_checkers.js in this way:

... and add a text area like te following:

Take also a look at this page for other information about this script.

4. ActiveSpell

ActiveSpell is a free ajax script to implement spell checking on any text box. It's maintained by ActiveCampaign, Inc and is based off of Ajax-Spell by Garrison Locke. You can fina download it here.

5. PHP Spell Checker
This simple PHP Spell Checker is used to spell check any of the input field of the HTML form. It is useful for webmasters who want to add spell checking to any text box (textarea) on their website or corporate intranet. The script is designed not to mess any way to your main script processing of the form. It just return modified (already spell-checked) text into any input field. It is written on PHP and using JavaScript as minimum as possible. Take a look at this page for more information.

Are you looking for new interesting fonts to make inspiration for your new website or design project? Take a look at this list with some beautiful free fonts you can download and use on your creative projects.

1. Take out the garbage
Take out the garbage is a very nice font designed by Kirk Shelton. You can use it for free for personal, non profit use. For commercial licensing, please contact the author:

2. Vegur
Vegur is a clean font set similar to Helvetica family, designed by dotcolon:

3. VTKS Animal 2
VTKS Animal 2 is a brush-style upper case only font set created by Douglas Vitkauskas. Useful to design headers with a big font-size:

4. Nevis
Nevis, this strong, angular typeface is ideal for headings. It features 96 of the most commonly used glyphs:

5. Bedini
Bedini is an elegant font similar to Bodoni. Useful to design typographic-style websites:

6. Pappo's Blues
Pappo's Blues is an original font set very useful to enrich your design with handwritten style graphic elements:

7. 309
309 is another nice upper case only font set useful to design bold headers:

8. Philosopher
Philosopher is a beauty and elegant font maked with Erico Lebedenco:

9. 2 Peas Goofball
2 Peas Goofball is a funny and tiny font designed by Lorenzo Simo:

10. Diego
Diego is another interesting handwritten font:

10 Beautiful and free must have Serif Fonts 10 Awesome typewriter fonts for web designers 10 Interesting fonts for web designers 10 Delicious Free Fonts with commercial-use license 10 Beautiful and free fonts for web designers 5 Beautiful pen-style fonts 10 Fonts to design original logos 10 Handwritten fonts you can't miss

In this post I want to reply to all my readers which wrote to me in the past weeks asking to me to suggest some interesting resources for beginners to learn Object Oriented Design methodology.

This is a small list with some basic references about Object Oriented Design process and it includes an UML guide, some articles about how to write OO javascript, PHP and Perl code. I also included some video tutorials about an useful introduction to OO PHP. If you have some interest link to suggest about this topic, please leave a comment, thanks!

UML Guide
The Unified Modeling Language is a standard design specification that is overseen by the Object Management Group (OMG). UML provides a nice framework for designing and analyzing process, structure and their relationships. UML is a collection of the best technical modeling specifications and practices is use today. It is mainly used in developing software requiring Object Oriented Analysis (OOA) and Object Oriented Design (OOD).

Design Patterns | Object Oriented Design

Design Patterns OODesign provides general design principles about Object Oriented Design with some well explained tutorials and examples about this topic.

Object Oriented Analysis and Design
OOAD.com provides a lot of interesting link about Object Oriented Analysis and Design resources, forums, links, basic methodology, book and programming roadmap.

Object Oriented Design with Javascript
This is a serie of three article which discuss object-oriented features of JavaScript. Part one provides background on how JavaScript supports the main principles of object-oriented programming. Part two demonstrates how JavaScript constructs can be used to build a class inheritance framework and write scripts supporting a JavaScript class hierarchy. The third and final part shows how to use the JavaScript class framework to build object-oriented client-side abstractions of ASP.NET user controls.

- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 1/3
- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 2/3
- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 3/3

Javascript is not a OOP (Object Oriented Programming) Language, but it supports objects, so why don’t use them? It may not be the best thing if you just want to create some small scripts, but as soon as you do a bit more than just reading some data from a form, it can definitely make sense to use objects, because it’s much easier to reuse this code later on. Take a look at this interesting post about this topic from nino.net.

- 5 reasons to write object-oriented (oo) javascript
- Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques
- Understanding scope in object oriented JavaScript

Object Oriented Ajax Application Design

Greg Brown explains how to use basic object-oriented techniques to build more robust AJAX applications. The demands on JavaScript as a development platform are growing with the increasing popularity of so-called AJAX applications. The procedural development model commonly used to add basic client-side interactivity to web pages today will not scale to support the level of UI complexity required by these applications. Fortunately, and contrary to popular belief, it is possible to apply object-oriented (OO) design principles in JavaScript, which can help manage this complexity.

SUN | The Java Tutorials

If you've never used an object-oriented programming language before, you'll need to learn a few basic concepts before you can begin writing any code. This lesson will introduce you to objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, and packages. Each discussion focuses on how these concepts relate to the real world, while simultaneously providing an introduction to the syntax of the Java programming language.

- What Is an Object?
- What Is a Class?
- What Is Inheritance?
- What Is an Interface?
- What Is a Package?
- Questions and Exercises: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

Object Oriented PHP for Beginners

Stefan Mischook wrote this practical tutorial to teach total beginners object oriented PHP. So before you begin, get out your favorite PHP code editor and be ready to write and run some object oriented PHP code. You can also download a PDF version of this tutorial or watch the following videos:

- Introduction to Object Oriented PHP (4:05)
- Why learn Object Oriented PHP (14:46)
- Objects and Classes in PHP (5:26)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 1 (9:14)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 2 (9:41)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 3 (6:18)
- Calling Functions from Another Class (5:36)

Perl Object Oriented Programming
Most people are not aware of the fact that Perl has support for object-oriented programming. If you've used another object-oriented programming language such as Java or C++ or been exposed to object-orientation, then object oriented programming in Perl is nothing like that. To do real useful object-oriented programming in Perl take a look at this article.

This post is a collection of some interesting and useful Ajax Auto Suggest scripts ready to use (from beginner or professional web developers) in your web projects. This collection includes standard auto suggest scripts, del.icious tag suggestion, autosuggest control to search images on Flickr, and advanced table filter with auto suggest control.

If you want to suggest other interesting links please add a comment, thanks!

1. Ajax Auto Suggest v.2

The AutoSuggest class adds a pulldown menu of suggested values to a text field. The user can either click directly on a suggestion to enter it into the field, or navigate the list using the up and down arrow keys, selecting a value using the enter key. The values for the suggestion list are to provided as XML, or as JSON (by a PHP script, or similar). This auto suggest class is very simple to customize and reuse in your web pages. Take a look here for the demo.

2. Woork PHP component: Autosuggest
Woork Autosuggest is a simple "PHP component" ready to use which implement autosuggest feature using PHP and MySQL. The component is lightweight (only with 8Kb) and ready to use simply customizing some parameters.

3. Spry Auto Suggest Widget

Spry Auto Suggest Widget (provided from Adobe Labs) use Adobe Spry framework to implement auto suggest feature in a input field. This is an example of using a Spry region and non-destructive filter to create an auto suggest widget. The suggestions can be displayed in any HTML structure. Spry uses the the tag ID to identify the suggest list container. In this example, there are three different HTML structures based on: table, div-span, ul-li.

4. Facebook-Like Auto Suggest

Guillermo Rauch's Facebook-like Auto Suggest is another auto suggest script which simulate Facebook auto suggest feature. It works by caching all the results from a JSON Request and feeding them to the autocompleter object. When a item is added as a box, it’ removed from the feed array, and when the box is disposed it’s added back, so that it becomes available in the list when the user types.

5. jSuggest 1.0
jSuggest is yet another auto-completer for your text input box. It mimics the functionality of Google suggest. jSuggest will also bind item selection to your up and down arrows and also allow you to select the suggestions using your mouse.

6. Yahoo! UI Autosuggest Control

Yahoo! UI Autosuggest Control uses AutoComplete to find images by tag from the Flickr webservice. A simple PHP proxy is used to access the remote server via XHR. The generateRequest() method has been customized in order send additional required parameters to the Flickr application. The formatResult() method has been customized in order to display images in the results container, and the default CSS has been enhanced so the results container can scroll. Finally, a itemSelectEvent handler has been defined to collect selected images in a separate container.

7. CAPXOUS.AutoComplete
CAPXOUS.AutoComplete is a standalone widget without dependencies, lightweight (only 4 kb) which provides auto suggest feature with an huge scrollable drop down list. It's simple to customize and implement on your web pages with a lot of languages.

8. jQuery Tag Suggestion

jQuery Tag Suggestion plugin simulates del.icio.us tag suggestion as-you-type feature (when you save a bookmark on del.icio.us). Tag suggestion helps you create a subset of tags that you commonly use for different types of links.

9. Google Suggest Style Filter with the AutoComplete Control

Matt Berseth's AutoComplete control provides smarter filtering capabilities for data tables which allow the user to select a filter column from a drop down list. Take a look here for the live demo.