DuPage Apple User Group » Web Design

More on hiding E-Mail addresses…

admin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:14:29 +0000

Posting your email address on a website is a sure-fire way to get an Inbox full of unsolicited email advertisements.

I ran across another way to encode your email address to hide it from robots. Here’s the link to The Enkoder Form.

This tool uses javascript to encode and looks like a better solution than SpamStopper, which I mentioned earlier.

The Enkoder is available either as a web form or a Mac OS X application!

And, it’s free!

E-Mail Addresses & Robots

admin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:55:20 +0000

Among other things, the “bots” read the underlying code used to create web pages. So what does this have to do with E-mail addresses?

Since we are reformatting the site, we thought we might pass on some tips you can use for your own site.

The following definition is found at WikiPedia

“Internet bots, also known as web robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human editor alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server has a file called robots.txt containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.”

Among other things, the “bots” read the underlying code used to create web pages (the raw file). So what does this have to do with E-mail addresses? Some “bot” owners collect addresses to be used by spammers. So, it is not a good thing to had your address out there for the picking…

We really need to have an e-mail address available, especially for anyone doing business on the Internet. Here’s a little trick you can do to somewhat hide your address:

Instead of using MyName@MyDomain.com, use this:

& # 7 7 ; & # 1 2 1 ; & # 7 8 ; & # 9 7 ; & # 1 0 9 ; & # 1 0 1 ; & # 6 4 ; & # 7 7 ; & # 1 2 1 ; & # 6 8 ; & # 1 1 1 ; & # 1 0 9 ; & # 9 7 ; & # 1 0 5 ; & # 1 1 0 ; & # 4 6 ; & # 9 9 ; & # 1 1 1 ; & # 1 0 9 ;

What the heck is that? It is “MyName@MyDomain.com” encoded. (I had to add spaces between each character to make keep it from being displayed as text.) I used SpamStopper to generate this link. SpamStopper is a free application

HTML Tutorial

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:05:08 +0000

Also at W3 Schools, you will find a tutorial on HTML!

CSS examples

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 01:22:01 +0000

I ran across a website which had a lot of information about Cascading Style Sheets, including samples and tutorials: W3 Schools

Look around and you will find a lot of web stuff…

Even more on hiding E-Mail addresses…

admin — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:43:53 +0000

Spam continues to flow… and while we will never stop the devious people who like sending junk, we have to do as much as we can.

Last time, I mentioned a program Enkoder, which is both a web page and an application. If you notice we have many DuPage AUG addresses handy on the right panel on each page. If you look closely, we made changes today.

The addresses visually describe what the address would be described, such as Webmaster at DuPageAUG dot com. This is so a spammer can’t copy and past it.

Behind the scene, one would think that the address is hidden in code because clicking on any of the addresses will open up your mail program with a new outgoing message with all the correct information (try it!). But this is not the case.

Here’s what the code looks like for the Webmaster:

Cool…