First, I’d like to thank Jason Irwin for his original SETI Stats plugin.

This rewritten Wordpress plugin displays user stats compiled from the SETI@Home project site. You can display your stats with a widget or with a snippet of PHP code.

• Member name
• Join date
• URL (if applicable)
• Total credit
• Recent average credit
• SETI@Home Classic workunits
• SETI@Home Classic CPU time
• Team membership (if applicable)
• SETI@Home site status
• Time of last update

Download
You can download this plugin from Wordpress.org.

Installation
After unzipping the download file, upload the folder “setihome-stats” into your “wp-content/plugins” directory.

Login to the Wordpress Administration area, choose “Plugins” from the dashboard, find “SETI@Home Stats”, and click “Activate”.

Choose “Settings->SETI Options” from the main menu and enter your SETI@Home Account number and an interval period for refreshing locally cached stats.

You can also activate the SETI@Home Stats Widget using the sequence described above.

Usage
SETI@Home Stats uses a widget to display your stats on the sidebar.

You can display your stats anywhere on your blog using

get_seti_stats();


You can see the plugin at work on the sidebar of this blog.

Bugs
None that I know of. If you find any please let me know.

I’ve rewritten my reCAPTCHA Challenge script and turned it into a site all its own.

DigitizeThis.org has all of the features of the reCAPTCHA Challenge I’ve created here but by being a stand-alone site I’ll have much more flexibility to add features and maintain the site.

The reCAPTCHA Challenge and DigitizeThis.org do not share the same database so playing here won’t affect the scores in both places. I plan on eventually deleting all trace of reCAPTCHA Challenge and just having DigitizeThis.org be the only place to record scores for solved reCAPTCHAs.

No reading! Just take me to the reCAPTCHA Challenge.

CAPTCHAs have always annoyed me. They are hard to read and not as effective as using math problems to prevent spam. Then along came reCAPTCHA. The premise behind preventing spam and digitizing books at the same time impressed me. Now these little anti-spam tools are doing something useful!

From recaptcha.net:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

…

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

…

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

I immediately began wondering what it would take to turn reCAPTCHAs into a stand-alone application. Digitizing books is worth it right? So I threw together a little game where folks can play against each other for the highest score - kind of like an old-fashioned puzzle/arcade game without the poor quality beeps and bops.

I hope you enjoy it!

reCAPTCHA Challenge

New Golden Gray is now hosted at Wordpress! Download NGG from Wordpress.

New Golden Gray is based on William Pramana’s Golden Grey theme. Golden Gray was originally written for Alex King’s 2005 Wordpress theme competition. In the last few years Wordpress has undergone many changes and the coding requirements for themes has also changed. New Golden Gray is a rewrite of Golden Grey to meet those requirements and to exploit the new functionality of today’s Wordpress, version 2.6, while preserving the aesthetic quality of the original theme.

Features
New Golden Gray has been written to include:

• Support for widgets!
• Accessibility features: access keys and friendly text browser support.
• A 404 page.
• An archive page.
• Support for GaMerZ’ WP-Print plugin.
• Gravatars.

Screen shot

Download
Download New Golden Gray 1.8 (81K).
Download William Pramana’s original Golden Grey (29K).

Support
Use the comments section for all requests for support or to recommend improvements to NGG.

What’s Next

• Improved navigation bar.
• Improved support for mobile devices.

Known Issues

• If your blog contains more than about eight page links, they will not all fit in the navigation bar and they page layout will distort.
• Some CSS3 code is used in the style sheet which won’t validate against W3C’s current CSS validation.

Trassare.com is now using the Winksite plugin to support the Wii and the DS Lite.  I do not have either of these neat toys so if someone out there does, please visit this site with your device and upload a screenshot for me.

I’ve been on an accessibility kick with my websites lately.  I’ve long supported the PSP with the Winksite plugin but today I decided to add activate the plugins for the other two game systems as well.  In the coming days, months I’ll be updating this site with accessibility controls to improve navigation and appearance on multiple browsers.