In an effort to curtail spam, web developers often employ an email address obfuscater.  Personally, I feel that these devices are a stop gap to a real solution. The best solution is to have a spam filter on the mail server. This will stop more spam from reaching a users inbox than any other methods combined.

Here are a couple email obfuscaters that I have used:

• Spam Vaccine
• Enkoder

I am about 80% of the way through developing my first WordPress design. It has been a fun process; WordPress has a solid foundation for developing upon. I hope you like the design. If you see a problem, let me know. I will try to address it immediately.

To Do

• Finish configuring SIFR for all SIFRed elements
• A few design details - i.e. the chain link fence.
• Style images in posts
• The footer needs some attention.
• Individual post pages nees a lot of work.
• Style comments, but no one is commenting so it barely seems worth it.
• Fix some spacing issues.
• Make all links underlined on mouse hovers.

That is all I can think of right now. I am sure some other details will shake out as I address the aforementioned list of todos.

I am in a continual process of reevaluating and documenting web development techniques that I have learned in the past. In this vain, here is a trick that I used on the Weary Davis web site for the menu. I have included an image of the entire menu unfurled for all to see. The foundation of the technique is covered well by David Shea on A List Apart in a piece entitled “CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death.” I use this technique a lot. In fact, I am using a version of it on the Robert Eatman redesign.

The benefits of this technique are clean, semantic HTML, easier asset management (i.e. one image to maintain), and pure separation of presentation from content.

Security-hacks.com has compiled a list of the top fifteen free SQL injection scanners. SQL injections is a common technique to allow hackers access to your database. Depending on the quality of an applications “security” coding, access to your database could reveal proprietary business information, allow a hacker to modify or delete information, or simply scan your tables to find SSNs or CCNs. These scanners supposedly alert a would be good developer to a potential security breach in their program.

Over the years as a web developer, I have had the opportunity to watch people surf the web. It is always fascinating to see how they use their browser to “find” what they are looking for. I work for a major university and have sat down with many administrative assistants to help them with the web site that they are maintaining (I won’t digress into the ramifications of having an administrative assistant maintain a web site.) When they need to surf to their own web sites, they do so in roundabout ways. They don’t simply type in their web address into the address bar. They go to the universities main web page and go to the A-Z listing or site map. This is a cumbersome method, but it is known to work. There must be some kind of disconnect between knowing the web address and knowing what use it is. This is akin to knowing the address of your friends house to be able to get there and knowing the physical features surrounding your friends house and thus knowing how to get there. It is ambient navigation.

This year the disconnect between knowing the address and typing it in the address bar and searching for the address of a web site has reached an all time high. Google has claimed that the search for Yahoo has beaten out the search for sex in their logs. I am not sure this has much bearing on how we developers present information, but it does indicated that the URL is not as important as a web developer would hope, at least as far as the end user is concerned. For search engines, the URL supposedly has some influence on the algorithm that is used to determine the relevance of the page within the search results. For web anal web developers, it has the effect of making sure things are nice and tidy. And who knows, as the education level of end users rise, maybe, just maybe, people will start to understand how to use a web address appropriately to find the information they are looking for directly without having to Google it.

Google maintains a supplemental index (known as Google Hell in web marketing circles) for sites that are considered spam, invalid, too out of date, etc. Being in the supplemental index means that your results won’t show in the first few pages of Google search results. For businesses relying on search engines to drive traffic to their sites, this can have the practical effect of closing shop for a few days a week. There is a lot of lost profit from the reduction in organic search results.

The key for web marketers is to be very careful how you market your site. Using a company that relies on ubiquitous linking strategy could be the death nail that kills your profits. Be very careful and monitor your site stats aggressively.

The best way to send an HTML email through Entourage is via MS Word. Entourage’s HTML editing engine is very basic. It is impossible to make text a link, ie you can’t make Telos Studios a link to http://www.telosstudios.com. It will automatically make URLs in text links, which is not adequate.

After you’ve created your email message in Word, goto File > Send To > Mail Recipient (as HTML) … That should do it. This method will also allow you to send tables, images, and other more complex HTML.

WIRED’s creative director Scott Dadich coined a new term called the Law of Optical Volumes, which basically states that for maximum readability the area between two adjacent letters must be equal throughout the document. This is controlled via kerning. Web fonts don’t have tremendous support for it yet, so I am not going to delve too deep into it just yet.

WIRED also has a new logo and site design. The former is okay. The latter is blah.

IE5 for the Mac was canceled nearly 4 years ago. I haven’t seen it show up in my server logs for quite sometime. IE5 Mac is dead, dead, dead. This means that the Comment Backslash Hack or Mac Hack and the IE5 Mac Band Pass Filter are retired. You will never see a hack like this in my css files again:

/* Hides from IE5-mac */
* html .buggybox {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */


Yeah for dead and dying CSS hacks.

All versions of Internet Explorer prior to 7 cannot correctly display the transparent PNG-24 images. In place of the transparent pixels are light gray pixels. The solution that I like the most is called the IE PNG Alpha Fix. It uses a .htc file that corrects the behavior of IE using javascript. The fix also requires the a CSS hook:

* { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc); }

I have used this solution on a couple of projects now, it works well and doesn’t require gratuitous HTML hackery.