Last week, while I think posting a comment to Brian Lamb’s blog, I was struck when the reCaptcha spoke to me:

This was not random; it was a phrase, and I grew up in Baltimore, not “in” but near Woodlawn.

And a wheel clicked after last week’s reflection of being creative inside a box– I wondered if I could create a story out of stringing together pairs of recaptcha words. Because sites can customize the appearance, mixing them up presents something more like a ransom note message made from cutting out words from magazines. So here is at least a prototype, not exactly a story in structure, but two sentences:

I sifted through these from a couple of sites by using the button or link to generate a new one (sorry to reCaptcha for the repeated quests of words not yet identified, I did, at the end of finding a word pair, submit those two), saving them as screen shots with file names based on the 2 words.

There was a small challenge of trying to find a variety of sites using the code- searches on “recaptcha” just brought pages about recaptcha. This is where a nifty Firefox extension came in handy. DOM Inspector (Document Object Model is a way of looking at the structure of web pages). I actually did not use the extension much, and disabled it, but there us a useful piece left in my browser.

Often I am looking at a web page and want to see how it was created or coded, so I use the browser view source to see the underlying HTML, but must rummage around to find the relevant portion. But after this plugin was installed, If I select a portion of the web page I wish to look at the source, a right (control on Mac) click brings up the contextual menu, and I have a tool to look at just the HTML source of the selected text:

This is handy, indeed.

So I select the text that included a reCaptcha, and looked for a key phrase I could search on that would show me other pages with the embedded code- it turned out the text “Get an audio challenge” (part of the title= tag of the hyperlink to the audio version of the recaptcha) worked well for finding other sites using reCaptcha. I ended up with about 30 word pairs to try and mix into sentences.

So maybe not high art or literature, but it was more fun than having a big pile of

I was going through gyrations to pull photos from an RSS feed, which meant I could only grab newer pix; John’s code scavenges all the photos by cleverly parsing the results of the flickr search results. I plunked in all his code and got all of the duct tape in place and was stunned that I did not have my usual round of 20 PHP typos in a row.

It did work as advertised, though I notice every time it had to do the search, there was a 10-15 second delay. This is because John’s code is storing all the search results in an array and then doing the random selection from that pool. I was able to speed up the experience by adding my own code to cache the array of search results into a local server text file, and then hitting that cache file for the data if it is less than an hour old.

So the new and improved (only under the hood, tomorrow the site needs to go into the body shop for shaping and painting) 5 Card Flickr Story site is now hitting any photo tagged in flickr as 5cardflickr… so start back tagging now! Please! I want lots of photos!

And a big thanks to John Krutsch for paying it forward!

And another big thanks to someone named “Sparkle” as the first person besides me to do a story- check out “and then the dog shows up”

Bonus points for stories about dogs…