Don't Back Down

A lot of fuss is being made about spam (as always). Luke doesn't like it, but then, who does? One of the more popular collection methods used by spammers is accomplished by harvesting email addresses from web pages. So you might not want your email on a web page, right? How do you get around it?

Luckily there are some options if you have your own site. If you have access to PHP, the fine folks at EmbiMEDIA have created a quick script to allow you to easily encode your email address so that it's not immediately legible to harvesters. There are Javascript solutions too, but I tend to shy away from JS as not everyone uses it.

If you don't have access to PHP, then you can always encode the characters the hard way, by hand. What's that? Don't know the characters in their URL-encoded form? Turns out that we can help with that too (thanks Tony). What I really don't understand is why these harvesters don't use the same technology as browsers to translate the characters. Seems easy enough, but they apparently don't.

For those of you who missed it, Google continues their march to world domination with the introduction of the Google Deskbar. A close cousin of the Google Toolbar, the Deskbar allows you to put a Google search right there on your toolbar. The search even supports Google operators such as define: and the Google Calculator. What's more is the Deskbar is easily accessible from any app by pressing Ctrl+Alt+G. Very cool stuff and perhaps one reason why Google allegedly rejected a takeover offer from Microsoft.

In fiasco news, the government has decided to ditch the goodwill generated by the unguided robot race from Las Vegas to Los Angeles by making sure only 20 contestants can compete. Unfortunately, several teams more than 20 have their sights set on the race and are likely to be left out in the cold. Your Department of Defense at work. Come up with a challenge, ask people to meet it, then tell them that you can only take a certain number of entries. Sounds like the same old, same old to me.

Looking to pass the time on a dreary Saturday morning? Check out the maze generator or the church sign generator (thanks Jeremy and Les) and you will likely be able to amuse yourself for hours!

Until next week...

Earlier this week, I met with two new experiences. In the first, I received some goodies from my Amazon Wish List, courtesy of a presumably happy customer of one of my Movable Type plugins. In the second, that same person asked if I'd be interested in doing some Perl work for him on a project he was working on.

Read "Am I a Consultant Now?" »

I think I've fixed the index to the point where it should work as expected with the new design. Please, please, please let me know if you see any problems. There are still a couple of areas that I'm not completely happy with because I can't seem to figure out why they display correctly sometimes and not others.

One of those is the sidebar. It looks good in Mozilla, but occasionally in IE it will disappear (actually it just moves down the page) when you increase or decrease the default font size. The other is the bottom banner. Seems it gets out of whack from time to time on IE. I don't know why, and often a refresh will fix it, but sometimes the spacing just isn't right.

Other than that, I think that this is the design I'm going to go with. Let me know your thoughts (even if you disagree). Thus far this is only the second page I've updated, so it's easy to back out at this point!

Update: I've got a couple things that aren't quite valid in both the CSS and the XHTML of the new layout. They're on the list.