KEVIN: The SitePoint Podcast episode 15, for Friday, May 15th, 2009: "This Way Up".

KEVIN: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint podcast, news opinion and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined by my panel of co-hosts.

BRAD: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.

PATRICK: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network.

STEPHAN: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.

KEVIN: It's another episode of the SitePoint podcast. Welcome back. We've got this week: Mozilla releases Prism 1.0 Beta; Facebook shuts down an important application; the top 10 technology terms that confuse your clients; and the Konami Code and what it has to do with websites. 

But first up this episode, Google has a new CAPTCHA in the works. Guys, what's your favorite CAPTCHA that you’ve seen so far?

BRAD: I’m a big fan of the ones that I can actually read. It’s amazing how many you hit, and literally, have to go through two or three different images to get one you can even make sense of. 

KEVIN:  CAPTCHA, by the way, for those who don't know, it's the scrambled letters, typically, that you need to translate – that you need to type the letters into a text field – to prove that you're human and not a computer coming to spam a site. It's a contrived acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Thank you, Wikipedia. I have to look that up every time. But I've literally seen ones where the letters are flashing and you don't know whether you’re supposed to type the flashing letters or leave them off. 

STEPHAN: I like the ones that are pictures that ask you to say how many this are in this or check the ones that are animals and so on.

KEVIN: How many kitties do you see in this picture?

STEPHAN: Yeah, exactly and that’s the one I have on my site. It’s actually on my forums, anyway, but the ones I don’t get are the reCAPTCHA ones. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those but they help you transcribe books. Basically, it’s what this is for but the thing that confuses me is that if we’re helping to put these books online, or whatever the process is, then who determines what’s right and wrong, right?

KEVIN: Well, that’s part of where this Google research comes in. Google’s new CAPTCHA that it’s working on works on the basis of people figuring out which way is up in an image. So they’ll take a photo, they’ll rotate it by a random angle, and they’ll get the users of the CAPTCHA to rotate the image to have it upright again. Just like with reCAPTCHA where it shows words taken from scanned books and reCAPTCHA, themselves, don’t know what the words mean, Google is showing images that it doesn’t, necessarily, know which way is up on those images because maybe when the picture was originally taken the camera wasn’t at an angle. So what they’re talking about here are these socially engineered, I think they call them, “socially adjusted CAPTCHAs” is the term they used. What they do, just like reCAPTCHA, you’ll notice reCAPTCHA always shows you two words. The first word is the one it actually uses to decide whether or not to let you in; whether or not you’re human. The second word; it just takes your vote as to what it means and compares it against the votes of other people doing reCAPTCHA tests and if it sees that a lot of users are typing the exact same word, then, it’s able to decide, “Alright, I now know what that word means. I can use it as a testing word.” So Google’s new CAPTCHA: they’ll always show you, say, three pictures and the first two were used to test you and the third -- it’s just collecting information to decide whether everyone can agree on which way is up. 

STEPHAN: That reCAPTCHA was the one that was actually infiltrated for the Time top 100 people to get the guy from 4Chan up there as the number 1 person. The reCAPTCHA that the Time was using to do their poll was infiltrated by the 4chan.org group, and their goal was to get around it and they figured out a way, figured out the words and, basically, fooled the reCAPTCHA into thinking the word that they were typing in was the correct one. So they circumvented it and they voted for the 4Chan founder to the top. 

PATRICK: Not only that but they made it spell out a particular phrase from the top 21 that they had decided to use. So, it was kind of embarrassing, I guess, for Time.

STEPHAN: But Time went with it!

PATRICK: Right. Wow, the integrity, right?

KEVIN: So, there are criticisms of these kinds of systems. I mean, obviously, if you want to break through a CAPTCHA like this in some automated way you can have your automated system grab the images and post them up on sites like the Amazon Mechanical Turk API where you can ask people to complete a task for you and you pay them small amounts of money so you can have people interpreting CAPTCHAs for you. If you get the answer back quickly enough you can have your system type it in for you and then you get in. But I suppose that’s not really the role of CAPTCHAs. The job of the CAPTCHA is to tell a computer apart from a human, not whether the human is up to no good or not. 

PATRICK: Right, that’s exactly the purpose. I found this article interesting, by Alex Walker, at SitePoint. This article will link to in the show notes but the comments were even more interesting in some of the concerns that raised such as the images themselves being able to be copied and sourced by bots and things like that. But if Google goes the way that they should go with this, or that it looks like they’ll go, they’ll use Creative Commons images or things that are out there, images that are out there for use, and you have just so many images out there. So if you take Flickr, as an example, there’s 2 billion images on Flickr – not sure of the source of that. So, let’s say someone wanted to download all images from Flickr to catalogue them and find out where their horizon lies. Well, if they did 10% that’s 200 million images. I mean, who has the computing power to be able to do even a halfway decent job of that? The answer is, not the average bot-running spammer. 

KEVIN: One of the commenters even pointed out that you could generate even more variations just by magnifying the image by a small but random amount and, immediately, you can get a bunch more images out of their same source image that an automated system wouldn’t be able to tell apart. I think it’s good progress. My favorite CAPTCHA that I’ve ever seen was Hotcaptcha which was based on the Hot or Not API. It showed you four pictures, three of which had, ostensibly, been voted up as “hot” by the Am I Hot or Not community, and one who is definitely not, and you had to pick the non-hot person out of the bunch.

PATRICK: The reason you like that is because you were voted up high. You probably saw yourself.

KEVIN: If only that were the truth. 

Our next story is Mozilla Prism. Mozilla has released a new Beta of their Prism dedicated browser and this is one of those browsers that lets you create an icon on your desktop for a particular web application that you use like, say, Gmail. When you launch it, it’s the Firefox browser engine in the window but you don’t get any of the chrome. You don’t get a location bar or a search box. You don’t even get backwards and forwards buttons. All you get is a window, the contents of which are that web application. So, you can use it as if it were a desktop app. Have you any of you guys ever used a site-specific browser like this?

STEPHAN: Never.

KEVIN: Never, eh? I suppose the counter argument is that people like Adobe want us to build these AIR apps that interact with our websites rather than actually displaying them, but this seems to be a trend. I think Google Chrome has this feature or at least they’re working on it. 

PATRICK: Right. I mean I’ve never really used this…

BRAD: It’s a really cool idea…

PATRICK: I’m sorry, Brad.

BRAD: Go ahead, Patrick.

PATRICK: Yeah, I was going to say, I’ve never really used this sort of program, either, and I played around with it in anticipation of the podcast. This is probably just the non-developer in me speaking but it seems like a glorified shortcut, to me. So I take it there’s more to this Prism, since it is being compared to AIR or Silverlight, than just this.

KEVIN: Well, the difference with Prism seems to be that, not only is it a way for users to create their own site-specific browsers, but once you’ve got a site-specific browser, as a JavaScript developer, you can expand it with features that provide additional user-interface and convenience features specific for that site. So, for example, if you’ve got your Gmail Prism browser setup you can use the JavaScript API that comes with Prism to add keyboard shortcuts, or what have you, to the site. Then, you can distribute that site-specific browser for other people to use. So, their ambition is, over time, these JavaScript developers will create these Prism applications built on top of everyone’s favorite websites and they’ll be able to create this directory of ready-made applications using the Prism API. So, instead of using Gmail, you may download hotted up Prism Gmail version 2 and download that, install it on your desktop, and go from there. I haven’t seen any of these, aside from the technology demos, yet. Do you think JavaScript developers will be keen to build this sort of thing or have they got better things to do?

BRAD: To me, as a developer, it feels like everyone right now is kind of in a mad rush to go into the Cloud because the Cloud, Web 3.0, that’s definitely the buzz that’s going around now. Then you have projects like this that come out that are kind of making us go back to where we started which was everything was an app, everything was a separate install. So it almost feels like a vicious cycle where everyone’s pushing towards the Cloud now, and then sites and services like this are now telling us, “Well, let’s go back to where we can have separate applications for sites, or separate for web apps.” 

STEPHAN: I think this goes even a step beyond that, Brad. I mean it’s like muddying the waters. Now you’re going to have multiple versions of a Gmail client. I mean, who’s going to know what’s good and what’s bad. I don’t know. It’s not attractive, it’s not appealing to me, at all, and I don’t understand the necessity for it. Maybe someone out there does but I don’t see the need. 

KEVIN: If you want to check out the work that’s being done on this you can go to prism.mozilla.com. Not only can you download the new Beta Prism, but you can check out some of the bundles that have been created and just have a look at whether this is something that interests you. Particularly if you’re a JavaScript developer check it out and decide if maybe this is a good way to provide an advanced experience to some of your users. 

Facebook, for awhile, were looking like they were opening their doors to developers pulling their users’ newsfeeds. So they created this API and it seemed like it was doing everything that we hoped, that it was going to bust open in the Facebook walled garden, the Open Stream API. Were you guys as excited as I was when they announced this or is it just the geek in me? 

STEPHAN: I’ll be honest, I haven’t really been following Facebook as I should be, and for good reason. So, this kind of irritates me a little bit on the Facebook side because I think that this was a good opportunity for them to really expand their market and go after Twitter, a little bit. I don’t know why they want to do this. It doesn’t make sense to me. So if someone… Brad and Patrick, do you see a reason why this would be shut down and why they don’t go after this? I don’t understand Zuckerberg.

BRAD: I think, ultimately, it comes back…they still want control over what they’re releasing. So even though they are opening up more data through the Open Stream API, they still want to control how that data is being distributed.

KEVIN: To clear that for our listeners, for a long time, anything that you saw in Facebook, in your Facebook account, you could only get at it by logging into Facebook. Then they opened up status updates, these one-line messages, much like Twitter. You could get access to those using an API and so a lot of these desktop applications -- the one I use is EventBox -- it lets you view the status updates of your Facebook friends without actually having to login to Facebook. This Open Stream API took it to the next level and gave Facebook applications access to everything that appeared in your Facebook newsfeeds. So, whether your friends were posting new photos or inviting you to a party all of that stuff was accessible to that API. An enterprising developer thought, “This is our chance,” and created an application that exposed that data as an RSS feed so you could subscribe to it using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever application you use to read RSS. Finally, everything that appeared in your Facebook newsfeed could be accessed without having to login to Facebook. Facebook promptly shut down this application on a technicality, it really seems like. They quoted a rule that said that, for privacy reasons, an application is not allowed to store the contents of your newsfeed; it can only query it and use it in the moment. But in order to have an RSS feed it needs to store a copy of it so that every time your RSS reader goes back it has the recent history of what’s been in your newsfeed. So, they said that because your friends on Facebook haven’t given you permission to store that data, that they are protecting their privacy by preventing you from doing that. It really seems like they’re using it as an excuse just to put up another wall.

STEPHAN: Well, do you think it has to do with page views? I mean, that makes sense to me, now, thinking about it. 

KEVIN: Well, yeah. Facebook needs to protect their page views. The more people login to Facebook to view stuff the more ads they’ll see. So that seems a cynical view but it’s pretty much what I think; that Facebook is doing everything they can to keep people from accessing stuff from outside of Facebook, even though that’s what everyone wants to do.

PATRICK: You know, I think even if that’s the case, and that could very well be the case – that Facebook is protecting their business – here’s the thing; they need to do that. I mean, do you want Facebook to be around? I read this article at webmonkey.com, the one we’re linked to, and he mentions how Twitter has something Facebook doesn’t, how it goes beyond buzz, something capable of capturing the imagination. Well, here’s the thing; imagination doesn’t equal dollars. You can’t look at Twitter and say, “Oh, that’s a great business model,” because Twitter isn’t making money. Facebook is trying to do what they need to do to be successful and to be around and at the end of the day. Facebook is number 1 and if someone can come along and do it in what can be viewed as a more open fashion and makes RSS feeds available then, more power to him. Come on up and be number 1 and if you can be successful, awesome!

BRAD: You know this is the downside of Facebook, now, being on top and being number 1. I honestly think if they were still sitting behind MySpace, trying to play catch up, they could do something like this to give them a significant boost and a lot of buzz from developers and new apps that could be launched and setup to really bring in new users. But now that they’re number 1 and they’re still flying making a gap even wider between them and MySpace is what’s the reason for them to do this because, you’re right, all they’re losing is page views which, in turn, means they’re losing the ad money.

PATRICK: Even if they did that – monetizing an RSS feed – there are RSS ads and, sure it can be done but, from all indications they’re not very lucrative. So at the end of the day, even if someone else came up and did this, if they’ve reached the Facebook level volume, they’re going to have to find a way to make money and chances are it’s not going to be RSS ads.

BRAD: Maybe this is where MySpace decides to go ahead and open up their gates and try to close that gap a little bit by just allowing everybody to do whatever they want with their data.

KEVIN: I guess the big question is, is it a sustainable business model, on the web, to put ads around content and force people to view that content with the ads alongside? Even before Facebook put this Open Stream API on, developers – if you look at, for example, the Adium instant messenger application on the Mac – this is a free, open source, multi-protocol instant messaging app and, even before Facebook opened up their chat API, the developers of Adium hacked in to Facebook. Well, I say “hacked in” but the application in the background logged in to your Facebook account and parsed the HTML in order to give you this nice chat experience on your desktop without having to login to Facebook. Even if you don’t offer an API your website can be co-opted as an API. So are all these efforts to force people to view your ads destined for failure and do the Facebooks of the world need to make peace with that? Maybe by making this stuff open and available, the way people want it to, the people that do come in to your site and see your ads will think more kindly of you and more likely to click those ads. I’m stretching it, I know.

PATRICK: Or they’ll become used to seeing no ads and expect you to have that, as well. Yeah, it’s a tough thing. I think content that is supported by ads can be successful. It all depends on what it is. I’m not saying Facebook shouldn’t open up and provide RSS feeds. I think its fine. I think they can be successful with it but, obviously, this particular integration they didn’t like. Will it happen in the future? I don’t think any of us will be surprised.

KEVIN: Facebook isn’t all bad, at the moment. Alongside the Open Stream API they also announced that they’re going to be supporting OpenID as a relying party and this is something that I’ve ranted about on this podcast before; that these big players are coming in saying they’re going to support OpenID and then all they do is give their users OpenID logins using their accounts. So, you can use your Google account to login to other OpenID supporting websites but you can’t use your OpenID from elsewhere to login to Google. Facebook -- for the first time one of these big players is going to be a relying party which means you can take your Google OpenID and use it to login to Facebook. In my case, I’ve got an OpenID with myopenid.net and I can use that to login to Facebook, soon. This is really exciting to me. Does anyone else find this exciting?

PATRICK: Well, you know how much I trust OpenID. I think we’ve talked about this - and you agreed with me, in part! I just don’t like it, that’s all but, hey, if Facebook wants to do it it’s open to users. If they love OpenID; have at it. That’s the option.

KEVIN: They said they’re going to have special support for some of the major OpenID providers. For example, if you’re logged in to your Google account – which if you use Gmail you will tend to be for most of the day – when you go to Facebook it’ll offer to, automatically, log you in. It will say, “You’re currently logged in to Google. Would you like to use your Google account to login to Facebook?” You can then login to Facebook without having to type a password at all. It’s going to be really slick for those people who are willing to trust OpenID providers, like Google, with their credentials to login to other websites. We’ll see how many people do that. 

Our next story is the top ten technology terms that confuse clients. This is a blog post on sitepoint.com but it makes reference to a recent UK survey of over 5,000 users which highlighted the top 10 misunderstood technology related words. So this isn’t specific to web developers, so that’s why I thought it would be interesting if we went through these here on the podcast today, and figured out which ones actually applied to the web. 

Guys, I’m going to read these out one at a time. You tell me what terminology you should use instead or if indeed it applies to your web clients at all. The first one, surprisingly, this is ‘dongle’.

BRAD: I always love that term.

KEVIN: I haven’t heard that one in awhile.

BRAD: Yeah, I don’t think it’s as popular as it used to be. 

KEVIN: Hey, when was the last time we needed a dongle for anything? 

STEPHAN: I used to carry mine everywhere, now I don’t carry it at all.

KEVIN: What did you have a dongle for Stephan?

PATRICK: You get it chopped off or what? {laughing}

STEPHAN: I used to have a portable Firefox on there and stuff with my bookmarks and stuff, but then I got a laptop or I figured I got delicious or something like that I can… 

KEVIN: So dongle for you means a USB key? 

STEPHAN: Yeah, a USB key. 

KEVIN: I think probably people would understand USB key. A dongle for me is when you bought expensive software in the late 80’s or early 90’s, it would come in the box with a little device that you had to plug in to your printer port in order to prove that you had a license to the software. So whenever the software started up, it would look to see if this thing was plugged into your printer port or not, and so if you wanted to use the software on multiple computers, you’d have to unplug the dongle and then plug it into the computer that you’re going to be using the software on. This was popular in expensive software like Computer Aided Design. A lot of the things that universities wanted their students to be able to use needed dongles which was a real pain because students would have to check out the dongle in order to plug it in at the computer lab and use the software. It was ridiculous. 

PATRICK: The dongle. 

KEVIN: I think we can safely leave the dongle in the past. The next one is probably a little more relevant, its ‘cookie’. 

BRAD: I don’t know how confusing that is these days. I’ve got to be honest. I mean, I read this list and I know just a few years ago, I think it was a little more confusing but now, even people that aren’t as computer literate, they typically understand at least the premise of a cookie and that it’s no longer viewed as this monster security threat that everybody thought it used to be. 

KEVIN: I don’t know if cookies have gotten a good name or that people have just assumed that no one uses cookies anymore when the fact is that now everyone relies on cookies. Most websites that you have to log into today simply won’t work without cookies. They're kind of like a fact of life, but do users need to know about them?

STEPHAN: And I think what’s helped us a little bit is that they’re on the Web with some browser and every browser has an option for the cookies in it, and when they run into trouble or when I get a message from someone, “I’m having trouble logging in.” Part of the first few steps of advice are to make sure your browsers has cookies enabled. So I think everybody surfs the web probably had to come to understand at least part of what they are. I mean for example, my mom knows what cookies are. 

KEVIN: Really?

STEPHAN: So my parents know what they are. So, I mean, to me, and that’s kind of a standard I would think. Do our parents know what it means and mine do.

PATRICK: Is it beyond that though? I think it’s just like now it’s like the ‘Remember Me’ box. Does your site have a ‘Remember Me’ box?

KEVIN: Yeah, exactly.

PATRICK: Yeah, but when that doesn’t work, they come asking and then what do you tell them? 

KEVIN: Well, okay, I think we can agree that cookies are best not mentioned but if you have to, you can probably explain them. The third one is WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). I don’t know about you, I’ve never actually built a site with WAP. I read a book on how to build WAP sites but I never needed to build one, and it seems of very little relevance today.

STEPHAN: Yeah, I don’t think it’s relevant.

BRAD: Yeah, I built a WAP application but it was probably like 2001/2000, around that timeframe. It was the last time I touched it and then I vaguely remember what it did. You could look up locations of inventory items in a warehouse based on a product code. I remember the specifications and the different coding but it seemed like there wasn’t too much of a difference between that and just standard HTML. I remember there were few extra lines I had to throw in.

KEVIN: Yeah. Well, it was this language conceived when mobile phones were much simpler devices and it provided a different paradigm for browsing the web on a handheld device. The idea was that having pages with links on them was not a good experience that you could replicate on a teeny tiny screen with a mobile phone keypad. So instead, it had this concept of a card stack and you could flip through the stack of cards and each card would have, if memory serves, a couple of actions that you could perform on them and you could read the text in them. It was just this sort of simplified form of presenting the web that was conceived for these small devices, but it seems like the users have spoken and they don’t want to browse the web that way or at least developers don’t want to be forced to have to create applications that suit that paradigm when they’ve already got web applications. So it seems the way things are going is to bring the full featured web interface unto the handheld for better or worse. So, no need to mention WAP. 

‘Phone Jack.’ Seriously? Phone Jack is number 4?

PATRICK: To me, this one is probably one of the more currently relevant ones or one of the ones that’s used because like I could use an example of me describing an Ethernet cable to someone who’s not technically savvy. The thing I have said is you plug it into the – it looks like a phone jack but bigger and then someone knows what you mean right away. So to me that doesn’t seem like a very difficult term.

KEVIN: We’ll move on. ‘Navi Key.’ I’ve never even heard of Navi Key. 

BRAD: I have no clue.

KEVIN: This is maybe something from…

PATRICK: I mean they’re from Nokia. So I don’t know what this is.

KEVIN: “The navigation key on Nokia handsets.” So, a manufacturer specific word probably best avoided. 

‘Time-shifting.’ I was just doing some time shifting earlier today. 

PATRICK: You’re already ahead of us. How far ahead do you need to shift?

KEVIN: Time-shifting, for those who don’t know is when you take a live broadcast or a live stream and you record it so that you can watch it later, but you can actually start watching it while it’s still recording. So anyone who has a TiVo is familiar with this; you can tell your TiVo to start recording a show and then even before the show is finished, you can start watching that recording, and it’s as if you’ve shifted that show into the future and that’s time shifting.

PATRICK: You know I never heard that term associated with TiVo or DVR.

BRAD: No, I haven’t either.

PATRICK: Because I never heard TiVo like “TiVo, the way you time shift.” I mean, I don’t know, I never heard that as part of the slogan.

KEVIN: There was a feature that I always find on the box of this TV tuner cards that you could buy in the 90s, so maybe it’s falling out of use.

PATRICK: Dated term.

KEVIN: Maybe people just call it TiVo now. I TiVoed that show.

PATRICK: Or DVR.

KEVIN: Yeah, DVR. ‘Digital TV’ is number 7 as opposed to analog TV. The United States is in the middle of messy rollout of digital TV. So I guess you guys in the States would have seen a lot of commercials about this sort of thing.

STEPHAN: Yeah, I’m constantly pounded in the morning before I go to work. Upgrade your television.

BRAD: Yeah, I was happy when the day came in February thinking we’d switch so we can stop watching these silly commercials and then they pushed it back six months.

KEVIN: The SitePoint blog post says, “It’s a moving picture with sounds. No need for further explanation.” I think you can probably safely call it TV, ‘moving picture’ maybe going that far. Number 8, ‘Ethernet’. There you go. Patrick, you mentioned Ethernet cable before. Seems network cable is a better bet than Ethernet. 

PATRICK: I call it Ethernet. I don’t know. Verbiage I guess. 

KEVIN: ‘PC Suite’. Number 9. I’m not sure what that means.

STEPHAN: Yeah. Is this candy? What is this? I don’t get it.

KEVIN: The only PC Suite I know of is the software that comes with a lot of phones. It tends to be called the PC Suite. Sony-Ericsson PC Suite is the software that you need.

STEPHAN: It’s like Office Suite, right? Like Microsoft Office Suite. Again, another term, that might be a little dated because I don’t know, I don’t hear it that much myself.

KEVIN: And number 10 is ‘Desktop’. Desktop. 

PATRICK: Those words with multiple meanings.

BRAD: I don’t agree with that one. It says more people understand it to be the top of their desk is that, I don’t know who thinks a desktop…

KEVIN: Well, it can mean a few things. It can mean the top of your desk.

BRAD: Maybe I’m just more of a geek than I think but I think desktop. It’s a computer.

KEVIN: It can mean your desktop computer as opposed to a laptop and it can also mean your Windows or Mac desktop that you see with your icons on it behind all your Windows. So I guess it is vague in that it can refer to these different things. So it might confuse people in that sense. 

PATRICK: Exactly.

KEVIN: Thankfully on the web we don’t have desktops. So we need not mention it. There you go. 10 terms and I think there were two of them that applied to the Web. So I guess that means that the web is much less confusing than computers in general, right? 

{laughter}

Our last story today is the Konami Code, and I have to say, I haven’t had a chance to look into this and this is news to me, but the Konami Code is, if memory serves, it was a game controller pattern. You could hit a series of buttons to do special moves in games like Street Fighter and stuff like that. What was it? Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I think that was it.

PATRICK: So the thing about it is, so the Konami used to make these games for the NES, and the Konami Code was obviously the coding games they created. It’s probably most popularly associated with the Contra game and then you would get 30 lives and that would be a boost on an otherwise difficult game, but recently, it’s been popping up on websites where if you enter the code through your keyboard, something changes, audio plays, a video overlay is played, there’s graphics, you get redirected to an Easter egg page or something like that. Probably the most popular one was ESPN a while ago when if you entered the code, unicorns, rainbows and glitter popped up over the ESPN homepage and they got rid of that very quickly, but that has sort of given birth to this wave of websites who are adapting that code as a feature from Google to Digg to just random websites. 

BRAD: You got to wonder was that planned by ESPN or was that somebody that just got fired that through that up there?

KEVIN: That’s a lot of work to do on the day you get fired, I have to say.

BRAD: Oh, you don’t have a little file slipped away for that day? 

KEVIN: So do you use the arrow keys on your keyboard and is B and A, the letter B and A on your keyboard? Is that how it works?

STEPHAN: Yes, that’s correct. That’s how it works and some sites have different triggers. You’ll enter the code and press enter or enter a few times or another key on top of it, but most sites will trigger when the code is entered. 

KEVIN: So we’ve got some code on the SitePoint blog post for this that uses jQuery. So you put the jQuery library on your site and then this eight line script. It handles catching the Konami Code and then you can put in whatever JavaScript you want for what happens when that’s detected.

PATRICK: And there’s a website dedicated to sites that have used this code. Its named konamicodesites.com and you have to use the code to get access to the list of course. But I’ve checked out a few of the sites and there’s like I said, different things, but one of my favorites is geek.thinkunique.org and if you put the code in there, you get the old theme song to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon TV show and I watched that. I don’t know about the rest of you but I watched that. There’s also a website called cubeecraft.com and they make this really cool like paper craft, things you can print out and make these paper models and if you enter it there, you actually get a character from the game, Bill Mad Dog Riser that you can print out and assemble. So I thought that was pretty neat as well.

KEVIN: Wow! Well, if you can think of something that will surprise your users, go ahead and hook it up to the Konami Code on your site.

PATRICK: You actually need to let someone know though, as well.

KEVIN: Well, yeah. Well, you could register it at this Konami Code Sites website.

PATRICK: That’s too.

KEVIN: Wow! Well, I think that brings another episode of the SitePoint podcast to an end. Get out there and start playing with some Konami Code Sites. Visit us at http://sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. You can also find us on iTunes. Just sign in to the iTunes store and search for SitePoint. You can email us your comments about this show and past episodes at podcast@sitepoint.com. Send us your questions as well and we’ll read them out on the show and answer them. 

Your hosts, today … Let’s go around the table with our hosts for today. 

BRAD: I’m Brad Williams, WebDev Studios and you can check out my blog, strangework.com and I’m on Twitter, williamsba.

PATRICK: I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network. You can find me on Twitter at iFroggy.

STEPHAN: And I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter at ssegraves and my blog is badice.com.

KEVIN: You can follow me on Twitter at sentience and you can follow SitePoint at sitepointdotcom. The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. 

Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.