Which is why I about cried for joy when I learned about Jumpchart, an online tool that does, well, pretty much exactly that. It takes the elemental concepts of a wiki—communal editing—and adds the ability to organize things hierarchically. It allows you to trim down your site to its basic components, pages and the way they’re ordered, and then open the floor up for content management until you’re ready to port it to the real site.

Jumpchart feels a lot like 37signals’ Writeboard tool, and it one crucial way, Writeboard is better—it tracks changes. For a certain type of client, like one who needs a collaborative tool to hash out internal disagreements about mood and style,
Writeboards’ are the way to go. Jumpchart hasn’t implemented anything like this, though I suspect someday it’ll come. But what Writeboards lack—hierarchy—is, to me, much more crucial. As one-off collaborative editing tools, Writeboards excel. Jumpcharts are meant for full-site content collection, and for that, they may be salvation.

Enough for hype; how’s it play out in practice? I’ve tested out Jumpchart with one project, a small one with just a few pages. It took a little prodding to get the client to sign up for yet another tool (they were already on Basecamp), but as soon as they were on board, I think they immediately saw the benefit. I know from my point of view, it saved me hours of collecting and managing ownership and reminding the client to send me their owed copy. Instead I simply opened up the Jumpchart floor to them, and pulled the content down in one final swoop shortly before the final site testing began.

For that small project, It worked really well. Yet, there are a few crucial missing features that prevent me from jumping on with both feet for all my projects, big or small. The most important:

• Control over export. They’re kind enough to let you export your file as XHTML, but they peculiarly wrap everything in a full page’s worth of code. I’ve got my own headers and footers; all I need is the code for the headers and paragraphs I’ve typed up. Bonus points for adding the option to export in Textile or Markdown.

• Versioning. Mentioned above. Not a deal-breaker, but it would be so helpful in those inevitable times the client changes something after I’ve moved the text over to the site.

• Mass entry. If my site is thirty pages long, I’d rather not have to use the interface to add page after page. Let me upload an OPML file, or simply type in the outline in a textbox according to a predetermined syntax.

• Quick formatting. It’s nice that I’, able to click a formatting rule and have it appear at the bottom of the editing textarea. What’d be even nicer is if I could select some text, click the rule, and have that rule apply to the selected text. I hate WYSIWYG as much as the next hand-coder, but this small concession would go a long way.

• Sitemap and overview. In thinking how I’d use this with clients, I’m realizing it’d be hella useful to have a description for each page. The more direction I can give my clients, the better, and a list of what’s needed would allow clients to simply surf through the outline and add whatever it said.

Bottom line: Anytime a company can tap into my brain and build something that so exactly meets my wishes, I’m impressed. A little frightened, but mostly impressed. Jumpchart is strong enough a product that I’m confident using it on small projects and recommending it others. Another version or two, and I’m sure it’ll be going into my core toolbox for site development.

But, as with every challenge I encounter these days as a self-employed web wonk, I decided to turn this problem into a teachable moment. As in, Let’s Learn about Captchas!

Here’s what I already knew:

• Captchas are those elements on comment forms that you to interpret a few characters of scribbled text.
• They often look like they were written by a serial killer.
• They are tedious.
• They are often unnecessary, as there are simpler, less cryptic ways to tell if you are a spambot.

After some research, here’s what I learned:

• Captcha is actually CAPTCHA, an acronym.
• What CAPTCHA stands for isn’t important, as the words were clearly defined after the acronym, and the fit is less than snug. The important point is that the T stands for Turing.
• Actually, the T stands for Turing Test, which goes to show you what I mean.
• The folks at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, who devised CAPTCHAs in the first place, have come up with reCAPTCHA, something so ingeniously cool I found myself thanking the spammers for giving me reason to use it.

In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA tests your humanness by asking you to retype two words. One of the words is computer-generated, and it’s against this word that the system tests your entry to see if you’ve got a brain. The second word looks exactly the same, but it comes from a different place: a repository of text scanned in via OCR, as part of a massive book digitization project. OCR technology is not perfect, and for very old books, the text is often illegible. By harnessing human brainpower in very small, distributed chunks, reCAPTCHA has random blog users interpret the words for them, adding value to the project without requiring massive amounts of extra resources.

The thing that makes reCAPTCHA so brilliant is the very same concept behind the water-pumping playground and SETI@Home—100% recycled energy. Capture some energy that’s already being used, and funnel it into the powers of good.

I’ve installed the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin on this here blog; I don’t have much to contribute, traffic-wise, but hopefully those numbers will increase over time. Big kudos to Carnegie Mellon for designing and developing this project. I’m embarrassed to admit I had a chance to attend your school for undergraduate studies, but passed you up for a sexier campus with a evener boy-girl ratio. Clearly you’re much cooler than I realized back then. I hope we can still be friends.