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I just spent some time trying to outrun my cobbler’s child-dom by using mod_rewrite to make the old URLs for contact, about and projects pages to drop the oh so late 90’s “.phtml” suffix. They turned out pretty great I think! mod_rewrite is worthy of a whole separate post, I’d say.

http://plip.com/contact

Along they way, I remembered that my contact page, simple as it is, was actually a target for spammers a couple times a week. Do they think I just fell off the radish truck? Silly geese. The solution of course is to use a captcha. There’s a number of them out there, but a while ago I stopped rolling my own and started using Recaptcha. Aside from being super easy to install and deploy, you’re helping their worthy cause. Sweet.

Now that you have your captcha stopping those geese from spamming you, you need to make it look like your site. Hours of hacking? Nope! Minutes of CSS stylings. Recaptcha is highly structured DOM with easy to reach classes for CSS. In just a few minutes I turned the the vanilla captcha into the the, well, even more vanilla plip captcha. OK, yes, I’m a geek who loves CSS. That’s me.