Journal - Technology blog

Everyone must have experienced this in the past, you get a nice new fresh email account, and within a few weeks, you start getting emails through from random people about Viagra. How does this happen, you only posted it on a few choice forums, it’s not as if you signed up for the viagra newsletter, is it? Unfortunately the reason you are getting these emails is very likely due to bots, automated bits of devilry which scour the internet for email addresses to abuse.

Spam bots, also known as email harvesters, email address harvesters, crawlers or spiders, are quite probably the single most insidious manner by which spammers collect the email addresses of innocent victims.
http://www.bestprac.org/articles/spam_bots.shtml

You will be pleased to know there are methods out there which can greatly impede these bots in their harvesting, but as with everything in live there isn’t really one which can be considered a perfect solution. Below is an explanation of some of the most popular methods:

Image replacement:
A fairly simple method really, replace any text links with your email address in with a graphic containing the address. A bit of a poor solution in terms of making things easier for the end user, as they are of course not able to copy and paste the address into an email client.

JavaScript:
This methd of course relies totally on the end user having a JavaScript enabled browser for the function to work correctly. A quick review of javascript statistics reveals this is a pretty good option, with 94% of clients having JS enabled as of January 2007 (Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp). But it’s not quite perfect is it.

Obfuscator
This method is basically just trying to confuse the bot using a combination of Hexadecimal and/or ISO characters so that it isn’t able to successfully harvest the correct email, and from the looks of research on this, the results are very strong (http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml). An example of this in action is my address encoded with a mixture of Hex and ISO characters

rob@robertjamesphillips.com

If you view the source on this, it should be impossible to read, but through the browser works perfectly an d retains usability.

An excellent web tools to use this method can be found here: http://www.seowebsitepromotion.com/obfuscate_email.asp

Moodal Box is a very popular technique at the moment is to load linked content without refreshing the page, very much like the lightbox technique with imagery. A script which can be used with the mootools framework is Moodalbox, all you need to do once setup is add rel=”moodalbox” to your a tag. Super! See below for an example of the code.

This is a moodalbox test

Update: Apparently moodalbox doesn’t play very well with swfobject, which is used on the homepage, so I’ve taken it off, as it crashes internet explorer

Update 2: I’ve removed it from the homepage, but the demo in this page should work ok, to confirm it seems that slimbox, moodalbox and swfobject cause internet explorer to crash between them. I’m not sure which script is to blame though.

I’ve recently been looking at an open source replacement for Dreamweaver and stumbled across an IDE called Aptana which focuses on front end development. Heres the introductory blurb from the Aptana site:

The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused editor and development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

You will certainly notice that there are some very handy features on there, such as javascript and css debugging on the fly, which cuts out those frustrating minutes waisted by simple spelling mistakes. The software is strongly related to the Eclipse platform, and as such you can take advantage of the plugins which are on offer, at work i have installed the subversion plugin enabling me to edit & commit from within one program, excellent!

It’s not all perfect though, you have to remember as with everything these days, it’s beta software, yes there will be bugs, yes there will be some things you don’t like, but features are being worked on and if you interested check out the development blog and forums. One feature i’m certainly looking forward to will be php syntax highlighting support. Give it a try you might be pleasantly surprised…

Incredibly interestingly the newly updated (and very nice I might add) W3C markup validation service has opted to use the mootools javascript framework for it’s fancy effects. Personally I find this incredibly insightful that the consortium has disregarded the competition (JQuery, Prototype etc) and go with mootools. In a strange coincidence mootools is also used on this site, great minds obviously think alike

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API…