I’ve been a fan of the SitePoint(r) online resource company for about a decade, having first stumbled across its predecessor, webmaster-resources.com, and then following the company’s launch of sitepoint.com in 1999. I’m not a professional website developer, but as I’ve experimented with website design and content, I’ve benefited from SitePoint’s free and for-purchase resources.

If you haven’t visited sitepoint.com before, here are links to two recent columns that show the site’s benefits to non-web developers.

The first is an under-the-hood look at Twitter, and what may be causing the service outages that are frustrating Twitter users. I haven’t read this anywhere else. (I don’t subscribe to many other geek-oriented sites, so I might have missed some. A quick Technorati search didn’t come up with anything better than this article.)

The second article was a rant about the CAPTCHA utility that many website use to keep automated robots from accessing sites. But the CAPTCHA utility can be a pain for legitimate site vistors–especially when it insults those visitors.

Read Reddit’s Flawed CAPTCHA: Adding Insult To Injury for more information. I liked one commentor’s point that insults shouldn’t be part of the messaging in utilities meant to block automated robots. The robots won’t read or comprehend the insults. Only humans, most of whom are potential customers, would understand the insults–and they are not the ones who should be insulted.

Maybe SitePoint will become a new (to you) source for web-oriented information.

I’ve been taking photographs since I received my first camera at age 9 or 10. During a college course on photojournalism, I learned about exposures, ASA film “speed,” lighting, photo composition and how to develop and print black-and-white film.

Today I use an inexpensive Kodak digital camera that I won at a company charity golf outing. One beautiful advantage to digital photography is that I can quickly and easily delete any photographs that I don’t want to keep. On the downside, I struggle with proper lighting, because I rely on the small (and often insufficient) flash that is built into the camera.

But above-average subjects can trump average photographers, as these photos show. All were taken by me with the Kodak, during a recent family vacation to Maui, Hawaii.