Archive for December, 2006
Protect Your Email Address From Spam Bots
Posted on December 20, 2006, under Development.
Remember when you could post your email address in plain text format on any web page, and not have to worry about getting bombarded with emails about a better mortgage rate or increasing a certain body part size? Well, those days are long gone, and today you must protect your email address from Spam Bots, which are automated searching bots that extract email addresses from web pages in order to be used in marketing lists. There are several tricks that one can deploy, that will allow your visitors to get your email address but keep it away from spam bots.
Email Icon Generator
The Email Icon Generator will create a little image that has your email address in it. Spam bots are unable to read the contents of an image, however your visitors will see it clear as day. The downside to this tactic is, you can’t put a “mailto:” link on the image, because a Spam Bot will pick this up.
Contact Forms
Contact forms have become very popular, and are very easy to create. Luckily there are many available to download, so you do not need to reinvent the wheel. WordPress has a plug in called WP-Contact that will add a contact form to your WordPress blog. A Contact form basically will create a form for a visitor to fill out, and behind the scenes it will fire off an email to your email address. Your email address is never exposed to the outside world.
Email Address Encrypted
This great little tool will encrypt a hyper link with JavaScript so that when a page is executed the code snippet will decrypt and print our a standard “mailto:” and your visitors will not know the difference. This is a great technique because your email address is hidden from spammers, but your visitors will not even know the difference.
Be Creative
You could create an ASCII art image of your email address. Your visitors will get a neat little text-image of your email address, but the Spam Bots will not be able to pick it up.
Conclusion
Spammers are constantly changing their tactics, so you might have to adapt yourself over time. Each of the techniques above has its own advantages and disadvantages, but they will all help you lock our spammers from your inbox.
Popularity: 4% [?]
6 Comments
Blogger Leaves Beta
Posted on December 20, 2006, under Development.
Google made it popular to release new services in beta. Through out the Web 2.0 craze, everything is in beta Google has more projects and services in beta, than they have out. Google recently took Blogger out of beta. Blogger is finally feature complete, and has no major bugs. Maybe this will be a new trend of Google, and we will see more services become feature complete.
The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
How To Customize Look and Feel of the WordPress Administration
Posted on December 19, 2006, under Development.
WordPress is great, but like the default theme the administration look and feel gets old after a while. Fortunately, WordPress was built in a way that allows to to customize virtually all aspects of the software, including the administration look and feel. My favorite theme for the WordPress administration is WordPress Tiger. WordPress Tiger uses the very popular Fam Fam icons, whcih give it a very slick and easy to navigate interface. The best part is it’s as easy to install as any other WordPress plug in.
- I. Copy the entire wp-admin-tiger folder (not just the contents) into your WordPress plugin directory wp-content/
plugins/. The file for the main plugin file (wp-admin-tiger.php) should be wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-tiger/wpadmin-
tiger.php.- II. Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress administration area, going to ‘Plugins’, then clicking ‘Activate’ at
the end of the ‘Tiger Style Administration’ row.- III. At this point, you should see the new Administration look.
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
XBox 360 Is Ridiculous On a HD T.V.
Posted on December 18, 2006, under Development.
Last week, as a little Christmas present to myself I purchased a SamSung 56″ DLP Television, and it is ridiculous! HD content looks good on the television, but a little disappointed in the lack of HD content and even some of HD content wasn’t recorded in the best format and is a little grainy. XBox 360 is awesome on the new T.V., especially with the surround sound Polk Audio speakers! I also picked up the XBox DVD HD player for XBox, because it was a cheap HD DVD player, and later on I will not feel guilty about picking up a Blue-Ray player if I feel like it. Gears of War is unbelievable, it’s like a whole new game. I am looking into the HD Tivo, because I am sick and tired of the Cable company DVR. I am excited about seeing the Colts play tonight in HD.
I have seen HD content before, but when it’s in your living room it’s crazy to be able to enjoy it whenever you want.
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
Thinking of Upgrading to Vista? Here’s a Start…
Posted on December 15, 2006, under Development.
Yes, I will eventually converting to Vista. However, I am too busy at the moment to format my system and do the whole upgrade dance. If you are still debating the upgrade or awaiting the customer release, I recommend you start brushing up on some Vista tips and reviews. Vista is a whole new ballgame, and there have been some major changes to how you accomplish tasks in Vista. In addition, Vista has some great new features that could go un-noticed or un-used if overlooked. Here are a couple sites and blogs that I have been following, and that will help tackle Vista when you make the switch.
- Chris Pirillo and his famous Lockergnome site have been posting great little tips, tricks, and how-tos in their Windows Fanatics section.
- Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has a very in depth review and look inside Vista.
- Microsoft, not to be left out of the mix, also has their own tips and tricks page.
Popularity: 1% [?]
1 Comment
Finding Dangerous Things With Google Patent Search
Posted on December 15, 2006, under Development.
If you have been anywhere in the last few days, you already know that Google launched a Patent Search Engine. The new search engine, in beta of course, gives you an detailed look at patents down to the blue print level. After a little playing around, I was amazed in the detail of plans you can find for potentially dangerous items. Here is a list of items I came across:
Now I understand this is all public information, and it’s certainly not the easiest thing to build any of these devices. On the other hand it potentially shows one of the downsides to the new search engine.
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
The Holidays Approach
Posted on December 15, 2006, under Development.
I try not to blog too much about me, as I know that’s not very interesting to most. As the Holidays approach, life is getting busy. I am taking four days off from work, to relax, reflect, and regain some energy for the New Year. I have a lot going on one the New Year begins, plus I think it will be an exciting year for technology of all kind. Personally I have some goals at work, launching more products at BlueCrestStudios, projects for my house, and finding time to spend enjoying life.
Anyway, to the point: blogging might be sporadic between the end of next week and the end of the year. So if a couple days go by and you haven’t heard from me, I am just taking some time off and encourage you to do the same. Have a happy holidays, and I am sure we will be in touch.
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
AJAX DNS, the New Kid in IP Tools
Posted on December 14, 2006, under Development.
Ten Ships recently launched AJAX DNS, the new kid in online IP and DNS tools with a cool AJAX twist. The tools are similar to other services out there, including: Live DNS, Whois Search, HTTP Headers, IP Whois, RBL Search, Ping, DNS Traversal.
The site is fast, and returns easily readable and printable results. IIt;s a great bookmark and I plan on using it to troubleshoot hosting and internet connectivity issues in the future.
Popularity: 2% [?]
1 Comment
Digg Users Getting Paid, But Does it Matter?
Posted on December 12, 2006, under Development.
Jason Calacanis reported this morning that he has received information that an not so insignificant PR firm has Digg users on the top 50 list and is compensating them. He goes on to say that the Navigators at Netscape are not being paid, of course. There has been lots of attempts to date to game Digg, some have succeeded and some have failed. There will be more of these services in the future, as Digg is a very popular site, and when you are on top everyone wants a piece of you.
Jason does go on to say that this will not kill Digg, and I agree it most likely will not be the end of Digg. He does, however, say that undermines the trust in Digg; which I do not think is true. Not only is Digg always tweaking it’s algorithm to pick up on these type of things, as Kevin has announced numerous times, but the community eventually will handle these types of things. The community acts as a better filtering system than any algorithm, as users can very easily see when a story is legit and not legit. Yes there will always be times where users collaborate, for pay or not for pay, to get a story to the front page and succeed. It is very much a cat and mouse game, but I do believe that Digg will win in the end.
The bigger question these people should be asking: is how valuable is that Digg traffic? So your story gets to the homepage, and you get a huge traffic boost and most likely some crashed servers that comes with an angry web host. Jason Clarke has an interesting read, on why this might not be as good as everyone imagines it is. And I agree, that this might be the doom of Digg, but that’s a big might and I would hate to see it happen.
The bottom line, is these schemes and ways to trick the system will always be around, but I am confident that Digg will always be there to advance the system to limit the success rate. As far as Netscape not having paid users, well I am not sure that Jason can confirm that, as it might be on a much lower level but it still may exist. In addition, Netscape doesn’t nearly have the name brand recognition that Digg does. Putting numbers aside, Digg is practically a household name in the tech community. Kevin and Alex have done a great job of helping that cause with their very popular podcast Diggnation that was mimicked on a Saturday Night Live skit. Their T shirt was even in an IBM ad. Netscape is not nearly as popular with the kids as Digg is, so naturally when some outsiders want to “get in” with what the cool kids are doing, they are going to get directed toward what most popular. It’s the difference between Google and Yahoo, and all the cool kids are using Google!
Popularity: 1% [?]
No Comments
Google Branded IE7 Found
Posted on December 11, 2006, under Development.
It looks like a Google branded version of Internet Explorer 7 has been found. Apparently if you search Google for “ie7″ an advertisement comes up for a Google branded version of Internet Explorer 7. The browser is labeled “Optimized for Google” which basically means; Google as your homepage, Google as your search, and the Google toolbar. An interesting move by Google, and a clever way to get ad revenue from all of those IE users.
Popularity: 1% [?]
