Journal - Technology blog

I may have mentioned in a previous post that I was thinking of freshening up the look and feel of the site. Well I actually found the time to do this (slowly) over the last few weeks, i thought i might aswell take my time with it, as there didn’t seem to be any particular rush. Some key things to look out for:

• A new way of viewing the contents of the portfolio has been developed, using mootools to handle the ajax requests, which fetches the different sections (Take note you can shuffle through the contents with the left/right arrow keys.
• New projects have also been added to the portfolio.
• You can now select an alternative skin (currently purple/pink, but more will be added), Give it a try.
• A little flash/actionscript widget has been added to homepage, which allows you to flick through three selected projects.
• I’ve added a Flickr feed, which I upload to directly from my n95, so it generally gets updated often.

Theres undoubtably some work still to be done on it, with some other enhancements planned. Some projects, which are currently being worked on, will also be added to the portfolio upon completion.

I’ll add another post as soon as i get a chance to go over some of the visual change rational between this and the previous version of the site.

Just a quick update on the portfolio section, which has been modified to make the contents more accessible and a bit clearer.  There are however lots more bits and pieces still missing from this section which I will attempt to update as soon as possible

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

This is a brief list of sites/resources that I have personally found useful in the past and could help save you some time, or even save your bacon if you’re over a barrel with a deadline:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com - Excellent tutorials, updated often
http://www.thinkvitamin.com - Most friday’s they have an excellent post of good new designs
http://www.cssbeauty.com - Sometimes has the same designs as thinkvitamin (who copies who?)
http://www.webappers.com - Often post links to good free webapps
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ - Excellent set of free icons
http://www.dotes.com.br/mootools/ - A list of cool classes for my fave JavaScript framework
http://www.digg.com/ - Keep an eye on this, decent stuff does come up
http://regexlib.com/ - Anyone that does form validation will find this invaluable
http://www.alistapart.com/ - One of the first sites in this mould, great articles

Just a few quickies for you there, i will carry on adding to this list though, as there are some great little sites out there.

Is it to late to make a new year resolution?  Who cares I’m going to make some anyway.  I’ve decided that i have been far to slack with keeping the blog up to date with helpful web design posts, and I haven’t made the most of the wonderful theming options wordpress provides.  To resolve this a lot more love will be going into all aspects of the site, I hope you are looking forward to the updates.  As a first topic I will be looking at how to post spam proof email addresses, check back in the next few days for that.

Recently I’ve been working on a joint concept with my brother based around his of creating a site to help users find alternative venues (pubs, clubs etc) in their area. I’m fairly excited about the idea as I think it’s a great one, plus it’s going to give me the opportunity to mess around with some more advanced php which I haven’t had the chance to do in a while.

So the first stage as always was to come up with a Photoshop flat to help put on screen some of the ideas we’ve been having in our heads. So using a temporary name (Ferret – I kind of like this) I’ve knocked up this .jpg to give an idea of the kind of thing it could turn out to be. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view

We really want to include the social networking functionality which is very popular at the moment and give it a community feel.

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.

This great looking project has got a lot of publicity on the net recently, and with good reason, the feature list is very exciting for an open source, free project. Blurb from the source:

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. With Magento, never feel trapped in your eCommerce solution again.

I stress again the features mentioned on the site, really are high-end, i would be very interested to hear if anyone gets a chance to install it. Let me know what it’s like

I’ve just added a new item to the portfolio section (the fifth item along in the slider), it was completed for Complinet during a stage where we were given free rein to create a provocative campaign. The icons themselves were created in Adobe Illustrator, but obviously the main work was done in flash. You can launch and view the flash demo in a popup here

A very quick vector illustration of a random Toshiba laptop, very random, but done in Adobe Photoshop of course.

For a closer look just click on the dodgy thumbnail to the right (It’s a shame that you can’t select an area of the image for the thumbnail in wordpress, but it’s still pretty impressive!)