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Being full-time self employed with Convurgency is a relatively new venture for me. For the past 6.5 years I worked for larger companies, and of course the nice thing about that was having health benefits. However, now I’m left to fend for myself, to cover all (though very few) health expenses.

Buying health insurance for my wife and I seems almost like a waste of money, considering that we don’t have any prescriptions, we’re young and in good health, all we really spend money on is dental work - like our regular cleanings. It seems like serious overkill to be paying monthly for something that in all likelihood we won’t use.

So you can understand how interested I was when I heard of the concept of the Private Health Services Plan. If you’ve never heard of it, here’s a link to one provider of PHSP (the acronym). It seems like a really cool concept, where you can just pay for the health expenses you have, and they become a company expense.

If you’ve heard of or used this service, please let me know your experience with it. Would you recommend it? Could I use it for my wife as well?

I’m happy to announce the launch of AllToronto.biz, a new online directory for Toronto small businesses. Though there are already popular online portals for finding businesses in Toronto, there was still a need to create AllToronto.biz as an alternative. The reasons for this are two-fold:

1. Our localized SEO clients will receive a featured listing in the directory, which will serve as a value-add to our offering.
2. Other Toronto-based businesses that are serious about Search Engine Optimization will receive very little benefit from such portals as Toronto.com. For a fraction of the cost, they will be able to receive an optimized link in what should become a pretty heavily trafficked (and very targeted) directory.

In the future, as traffic to the site grows, I will be adding a review/voting mechanism. Also, if it becomes a popular request, I’ll add features such as the ability to find popular restaurants in your neighbourhood. All in good time though! For the time being, the site’s purpose is primarily for the advertising of business websites.

So if you happen to have a Travel Agency in Toronto, feel free to place a listing. And I really do mean “feel free”, as the listings will all be free for the next 3 months!

So, starting a business is supposed to be a gradual thing. But in the last few months, business levels (and thereby revenue) is seeming to increase exponentially! Honestly, at this rate, in a year or so I’ll be digging around to find some Staff Leasing! Although perhaps at this point it’s a little too early to tell, but with Online Marketing going the way it is, it doesn’t look like there will be any end in site!

I was supplied recently with a link to Elite Business Solutions, which is a Human Resources Management outsourcing company. Honestly, I’d never even really considered the concept previously, but it makes perfect sense. In most small companies, people are already wearing multiple hats, and stretched thin, it’s unrealistic to expect someone to suddenly take on the HR management role when new personnel are required. That’s really the concept behind Employee Leasing, all that is done for you, for a fee of course, based on the number of employees your company already has.

At first I thought that a Staff Leasing Company was pretty much the same as a temp. agency. But going through the site, I see that they’re completely different. A temp. agency you’d only go to when you need someone in for a brief period of time, to accomplish a set task. This seems to be more like permanent employee finding, which is really what most businesses would need.

I’ve decided to start with my video blog, too. It will cover the same topics like the topics that you can find on eMarketingBlog.com
Stay tuned!

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Original post by eMarketingBlog.com

We have all been faced with the sometimes daunting task of having to guess what those little numbers/letters are at the bottom of the form, that will classify you as a human being. Some people seem to be less human than others, since they either have trouble understanding the concept of what to do, or have trouble reading it.

So that leaves us with the question:

"What can we do to make it easier/less annoying for the visitor to fill in our forms and at the same time prevent our inbox (or comments box) from being filled with those nasty spam messages."

After reading Darren’s post on CAPTCHAs, I decided to write about a method that we here at Quirk have been evaluating and will now, with the publishing of this post, be implementing on GottaQuirk, to determine if we can do away with the need for a CAPTCHA.

First, I have to give credit to an article that appeared at Internet Storm Center, from where this solution was born. Our solution is based on checking two things that do not require any human input:

1. Get a spambot to fill in a field in the form that is not visible to a human and do a check to see whether that field was filled in
2. Work out the time that it took for the form to be submitted

Here is how you can implement the two checks:

1. Get a spambot to fill in a field in the form that is not visible to a human and do a check to see whether that field was filled in

• Add a text input field to your form and give it a name that makes sense, like "subject" or "telephone", or any other name, as long as it does not already occur in the form.
• Then with some CSS hide the table row or div that the input field is in by using the "display:none;" style.
• Lastly add some code that checks that the hidden field was not filled in.

Some things to keep in mind:

• If this is an existing form that has already been spammed then you will want to change the form’s action to something new. The reason for this being that spambots tend to cache your form and by changing the action name you force them to at least re-cache the modified form with the hidden field.
• The code that checks whether the hidden field has been filled in cannot be a client side script like some javascript function as spambots will hit the form’s action url with the parameters directly.
• Also, if for some reason the visitor’s browser ignores the CSS that hides the field, add a message in the form that explains that the field should not be filled in and that it is used for spambot detection. Of course make sure that this message is in the table row or div that you hide.
• Don’t just ignore the form submission if it is submitted with the hidden field filled in. Rather return to the form with an error message that explains that the form field should not be filled in.

2. Work out the time that it took for the form to be submitted

• In your form, add a hidden variable and set its value to the time stamp of when the form was loaded. This is easy to achieve with PHP or Java.
• Then, once the form has been submitted, get a new time stamp value and compare the two values.
• If the new value is less than say about 5 seconds (or how ever long you estimate it will take a human to fill in your form, remembering that spambots will do it almost instantaneously) then you can return to the form with a error message stating that the form was submitted in too short a time period.

We have used these two methods separately with great success in each case. Together, they should keep you ahead of those spambots for just a while longer…till they get more advanced.

There probably are some shortcomings with these methods, and I don’t for one moment try to say that they are 100% spam proof - especially if the spammer is not a bot but a human that actually goes to your page and submits the form, but this should keep you ahead of those spammers for a while and keep your inbox or your blog clean of "Cheap Viagra" specials.

If anyone has any suggestions that might improve these methods, please feel free to share them. Who knows, maybe we can someday come up with a complete solution that will rid us of these spam messages for good.

Comment on “An alternative to irritating CAPTCHAs”

Original post by Jean du Plessis

Earlier this week, one of GottaQuirk’s readers commented that our CAPTCHA system wasn’t working properly on IE7 (BTW - this has since been fixed) and it reminded me of how much I hate them (I hate CAPTCHAs - not the readers).

I understand why they exist, and I’ve sort of come to accept them as a necessary evil, but they still cause me a fair bit of annoyance.
I don’t know if my vision is just poor, but I’d estimate that at least once a week I misinterpret a CAPTCHA code.

I’ve just come across this article over at web log tools collection and it raises a few interesting points.

For me, the big one is,

 "Any extra work required to comment is likely to deter some people from commenting at all."

So now, having been reassured that my own anti-captcha view is not a completely irrational one, I’m wondering how many readers of this blog feel the same way.

Does a CAPTCHA ever deter you from posting a comment? Let me know in the comments section.

(Yes, I do realise the irony of asking people to enter a CAPTCHA code to comment on their dislike for said codes)

Comment on “CAPTCHAs - A necessary evil?”

Original post by Darren Ravens