I recently decided to build a few websites and found a need to have a set of social media icons to link to all of the related profiles for each site. Since some of them have associated profiles on more recently created social networks, I had to find a nice full set that included icons for sites like Google Plus and Pinterest.

Elegant Themes has a really nice set with a lot of different icons, including the more recent social networks. The set is GPL licensed, so you can use them in Wordpress themes and plugins, intended for distribution or sale. This set is now my default for using when building sites and blogs.


While building my portfolio site, I found the need to have an icon that matched that set, to link to my DC profile.

After editing the included Flickr icon, I now have a matching one with Cody, which I am now sharing with anyone that would like to use the set provided by Elegant Themes, and have a matching icon to link to their DC profiles.

An activist group called Civil Rights Defenders has developed a new Captcha system to keep spambots out and inform users of global civil rights issues.

Instead of visually decoding an image of distorted letters, the user has to take a stand regarding facts about human rights. Depending on whether the described situation is positively or negatively charged, the CAPTHA generates three random words from a database. These words describe positive and negative emotions. The user selects the word that best matches how they feel about the situation, and writes the word in the CAPTCHA. Only one answer is correct, the answer showing compassion and empathy.

An API and a PHP library are available.

I need a good simple 5-star ratings plugin for Wordpress, to allow visitors to rate posts without requiring that they sign up, log in, leave a comment, etc.  Something that they can just click and go.

I used to have comments open on the blog but found that most visitors responded better to a simple star rating widget, requiring nothing more than a single click to leave feedback. After reviewing a few years worth of comments and finding that 95% of them were spam and the rest useless, I closed comments and hid all existing comments on posts.

I am currently using an old offsite 3rd party service (JS-Kit) to insert the ratings system into the posts. JS-Kit was sold and they no longer offer this service to new blogs. I don't have much faith that this service will continue in the future and I'd like to find a replacement for it, that doesn't rely on a 3rd party offsite service.

Do any of you have any experience with any of the many plugins available, to guide me in the right direction to a plugin that works well, is actively developed and supported, in which documentation, faq, bug reports, etc. are not hidden behind a paywall? Bonus points if I can manually set the initial ratings level individually for each post (about the only way I could possibly import existing ratings).

I was considering trying GD Star Rating, till I noticed that the developer deleted his site and the original free user forum with all the documentation for it and hid most of the content behind a "pay for support" forum, in which you can't even gain read-only access, without paying. From what I understand, it's a rather complex plugin and not documented very well, difficult to get working properly without having access to the additional material that used to be available for free on the developer's site. Sure, I could access some of the original content on archive.org's Wayback Machine, but there is no way of knowing if any of the info is outdated or still applies to the current version of the plugin. Also, any documentation of newer features would not be there. For this reason, I have low confidence for this plugin and will not consider it.