As we all know, no matter how busy your life gets, there is always room for beer.

Unfortunately, there may not always be room for blogging about beer. Ron and I have both been very busy with our respective lives, hence our apparent absence.

However, I’ve been able to do some “back-end” type work on the site to make it a bit better.

First, we’re now running WordPress 2.3.1, the (as of this writing) latest version. I also got all of the plugins we use updated to their latest versions as well.

One new one, that I’m a little sorry I had to add, is reCAPTCHA.

I’m sure you already know what a CAPTCHA is, but the stupidly simple description is the squiggly letters you need to enter when filling out a form to prove that you’re not a ‘bot.

Unfortunately, comment spam is an issue. We have, for some time, been using the double-layer of Akismet and Bad Behavior to prevent comment spam from getting through. However, every once in a while a legitimate comment gets flagged as spam. So, I need to go through the collected spam now and again to pull the nuggets out of the filth.

As Hop Talk has gotten more popular, however, we’ve attracted more spammers. So, in an effort to slow them down, I’ve added reCAPTCHA. It has the features that a good CAPTCHA should have: an audio option for vision-impaired users and an easy way to generate a new one if the one displayed is too unreadable, but also offers the added benefit of helping digitize physical books into electronic form.

What is reCAPTCHA?

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

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.

So, while I regret having to put a barrier, even an easily surmountable one, before our dear readers, at least it helps expand access to human knowledge. If you have problems with it, please let us know via our Contact form. (It also has a CAPTCHA, but it’s of a different variety.)

Enough with the administrivia. Let’s get back to the beer!

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