Category Archives: BLog Technicalities

Information about the creation and maintenance of this site.

Gravatars Update

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I’m having second thoughts about that gravatar feature.

Last Saturday, I added a gravatar feature to this site. As I discussed in this article, the gravatar image for anyone who had one would automatically appear when they wrote a comment on this site. Just a kind of cool and funky way to add more personality to the site. Not that we get so many comments here.

On Saturday, I also submitted my own gravatar for rating and approval. And I’m still waiting for it to be approved.

Now in this day and age, we’re all pretty accustomed to immediate gratification. You apply for something online — a new account to access a Web site, etc. — and you get an e-mail message with approval within minutes. This is commonplace. So the fact that I’ve been waiting five days for a perfectly acceptable photo (G rated, I assure you) to get approved makes me wonder how serious the folks at gravatar.com are about this system they set up.

I was over on the site and it appears to be the work of a single very talented but very busy person. He’s working on Gravatar 2.0 (whatever that is) and asked for volunteers to help him rate and approve new submissions. Over 100 people volunteered, including me. I offered up to an hour a week until he was caught up. I didn’t get any reply.

The forums are a mess of extremely frustrated new users (like me) who have been waiting to use the feature. Some of them claim they’re embarrassed because they set up the feature on their sites and they’re one of the few people who don’t yet have a gravatar. I don’t feel that way. I don’t expect most of the visitors here to have one. But I am anxious to see if I implemented it correctly and the only way to do that is to see a comment from someone — like me — who has a gravatar.

Part of me urges those of you who are interested to go to gravatar.com, apply for a free account, and submit an image. Then kindly remind the management there, in the forums, that you’re waiting. Maybe that’ll put a fire under their butts and they’ll use some of those volunteers to rate and approve all the gravatars in the queue.

The other part of me says forget about it. Maybe it was just a bad idea.

I’ve always had a problem with patience. Maybe this is a test.

In any case, I’ll let you know when my gravatar appears so you can see how it’s implemented on this site. I’ll probably write an article about it for WordPress users, too. But first I need to make sure I got it right.

Time, apparently, may tell.

E-Mail Addresses on Web Sites

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Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, e-mail me! which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.

RSS Summaries

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A reader chastises me.

The other day, while writing about the Reading Options in WordPress, I decided to experiment with this blog. I togged the settings so only summaries of my entries would be sent to people accessing with RSS readers.

Understand that I don’t use an RSS reader. I surf the old fashioned way, with a Web browser. I don’t surf that often and I don’t follow any one particular blog or site. So it’s never been an issue for me.

But for the book, I had to understand what this WordPress feature did. So I toggled it to the Summaries setting, downloaded a feed reader, and looked at the result. What I saw was a list of 10 or so posts in a window. I’d click a post title and the beginning of the post would appear in a window pane beneath the list. There was a link at the end indicating that there was more; clicking the link brought me to my Web site.

This seemed a logical way to release content via RSS. After all, didn’t I want visitors to come to the site where they could read not just the articles but the comments? And see all the pictures that came with the piece?

Dori of Wise Women didn’t think so. She commented on my “Stand Up for Your Principles” piece to stand up for her principles: that RSS feeds for blogs should include the entire content.

Whew! No problem. This morning, I remembered what I did to create the summaries (I did have to remember something I learned about 2 whole days ago!) and toggled the option back to its original settings. I just checked it with my feed reader and it’s working fine.

But this makes me curious. I’d like to know more from the folks who use an RSS feed reader to follow this blog. Here are a few questions; I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to answer a few of them in the Comments for this post.

  • How often do you check the site? Regularly? (If so, I’m flattered to be on your list!)
  • Why do you prefer a news reader to a Web browser?
  • Does your news reader display formatted text and graphics?
  • Which reader do you use? On what computer platform?
  • Would you like to share any advice for people considering using a reader or for bloggers like me who aren’t fully aware of the benefits?

Although I’m a technical person and write about computer technology for a living, I made a decision long ago to concentrate on only those technologies that I use or write about. There’s just too much out there to learn it all — and still have a life that doesn’t revolve around a computer! As a result, my knowledge of computer technology is spotty, with expertise on certain topics balanced by sheer ignorance of others. (Ignorance is bliss, they say.)

Perhaps its time to give the RSS feed reader topic a bit more attention. What do you think?

PostScript: I just used my RSS reader to check out the other blogs that were included in it. It appears that none of them include the full text of the article. What’s going on here? Perhaps that’s why I discarded the idea of using a reader when I first tried it about two years ago? Because you had to go to the Web site anyway to read the article? It seems that, in many instances, the reader adds an extra step to following blogs. If you’re commenting on this piece, please comment on that, too.

NateMail

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A good e-mail form processing tool.

While I’m praising software developers, I really ought to take a moment to mention Nate Baldwin, author of NateMail. NateMail is an excellent PHP script for handling e-mail forms.

Here’s the problem. E-mail harvesting robots are programs used by spammers to gather e-mail addresses posted on the Web. They go through Web sites and pull in anything that looks like an e-mail address — for example name@domain.com. (That’ll cause some spam bouncing.) That address gets added to their spam lists and the addressee gets spam.

It doesn’t matter if the address is visible to a Web site visitor as text on a Web page or encoded as a mailto link in the source code of the page. The robot will find it and grab it.

This poses a challenge for Web site developers who want to include a contact method on their sites. If you enter your e-mail address or provide a link to it, it’ll be gathered and spammed.

Enter NateMail (and other programs like it). They work with e-mail forms like the one you’ll find on my Contact Me page and the Contact Us page on wickenburg-az.com. My e-mail address does not appear anywhere on the form, either visible to the site visitor or in the page’s source code. Instead, the form calls NateMail, which has the e-mail address embedded in it. Because NateMail is located where the robots can’t find it (outside the Web directory), my e-mail address remains invisible to the robots. This prevents my e-mail address from being harvested for spam, thus greatly reducing the amount of spam I get.

NateMail is easy to configure and use. Of course, it does require PHP to work, so if you don’t have a PHP compatible server, it’s of no use to you.

One of the neat features of NateMail is that it supports multiple e-mail addresses. So a form can include a menu of addresses and NateMail will send the form to the addressee that’s selected by the sender. You can see this on wickenburg-az.com, where I used it to allow mail to be sent directly to the site’s regular contributors.

NateMail is free, although donations are always accepted. I liked NateMail so much that I bought Nate’s other program, ProcessForm, for $15. It does what NateMail does and more, including accepting file attachments. When I have time, I’ll set it up on wickenburg-az.com so visitors can e-mail photos for publication on the site.

What is a blog?

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Or, more specifically, what is my blog?

Blog is short for Web log. From the moment I discovered blogging — back in September 2004, I think it was — I’ve always thought of a blog as a sort of online journal. A place to write about the things I think and do. A way of recording them for the future and sharing them with others who might either think or do similar things or find my thoughts and actions interesting.

That’s what my blog is and always has been: an online journal.

Bloggers have been getting a lot of press lately. Especially political bloggers. I just read “Not Just Another Column on Blogging,” by Jack Shafer on Slate.com. In that piece, he discusses several things that have changed the newspaper industry. Blogging, he argues, is one of them.

From his article:

Michael Kinsley made me laugh a decade ago when he argued against Web populists replacing professional writers, saying that when he goes to a restaurant, he wants the chef to cook his entree, not the guy sitting at the next table. I’m not laughing anymore: When there are millions of aspiring chefs in the room willing to make your dinner for free, a least a hundred of them are likely to deal a good meal. Mainstream publishers no longer have a lock on the means of production, making the future of reading and viewing anybody’s game.

The problem, it seems, is finding the 100 capable of making a good meal. Fortunately, I don’t spend enough time surfing the Web to sample the available offerings. (And I hope you don’t, either. There are far better ways to waste time.)

Anyway, this isn’t me that he’s talking about. My blog may state political opinions, but it does not attempt to replace reporters, who I still try to trust to report the truth. Some of my blog entries are rehashings of the “truth” that I’ve heard or read, filtered through my brain, which includes personal experiences and preferences.

Again, from the top: my blog reports the things I think and do. It should not be used as a primary source of information for anything. (Does that sound like a legal disclaimer? Kind of eerie, if you ask me.)

Also, my blog has never been a way to gain popularity with readers or site visitors. In fact, some of my viewpoints are very unpopular with certain subsets of people. But this blog isn’t an entry in some kind of popularity contest. It’s my way to exercise the free speech I’m granted in the U.S. Consitution. (The same Constitution that has been in the news a lot lately.)

I’m also not trying to convince people who don’t agree with me on issues to agree with me. I hope that people will think about the things I write here, even when they don’t agree with me. After all, I think about most things I hear and read. That’s how my opinions come about. I don’t just echo the sentiments of others.

(I also hope that people think. Period. I’m so tired of talking to people who echo the thoughts of others.)

In general, I don’t care if others agree or disagree with me. I’d love to read (and share) rational, well-thought-out arguments from both sides. That’s what the Comments links are for. (Duh.) Just don’t get nasty. Nasty doesn’t get deleted. Nasty remains online to show the world just how immature some people can be.

Anyway, this entry was brought about primarily by reading Mr. Shafer’s article today and thinking about how my blog doesn’t fit into what is quickly becoming the definition of a blog: an amateur’s attempt at serious journalism.

This isn’t journalism. It’s my diary. I just don’t keep it locked up.

And heck, no one is forcing you to read it.