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.

SOTU Bingo, Anyone?

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Just when you thought you heard it all…

John Dickerson’s Slate.com article, “State of the Union Watch Parties – Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” talks about some of the festivities that will be going on throughout the country tomorrow night. My personal favorite:

At the Center for Global Development party, participants will play “SOTU bingo” listening for references to “HIV/AIDS,” “trade,” and “Africa” in the speech. Each time Bush says one of those phrases, players mark the box on their card, screaming “Bingo!” if they get a full plate. (They win mugs and T-shirts). Given how little Bush talks about those issues, the cards also have boxes with filler words like “peace,” “freedom,” and “democracy” that are more likely to be mentioned. The CGD party sold out in two hours…

And yes, you can click the cards link to download a PDF file with 11 cards for your own party.

Hard Disk Project Done

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And problems gone (knock wood).

If you’ve been following this topic, you know that I was having hard disk problems and decided to resolve them by reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling all my software from scratch.

After some problems getting Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to install properly — I think there were scratches or dust on the disc — I was finally able to start installing software on my hard disk. iLife ’06 went first because I needed to work with iWeb for a project and I wanted to get my iPhoto library back online. One by one I pulled out the original program discs for my big software products: Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and InDesign. And then I pulled out the archives I use to save the original installers for downloaded software like Fetch, Nicecast, Audacity, and others. It took me most of the day last Wednesday to get the job 75% done. I’ll do the rest as I need to.

One thing that disappointed me was that I couldn’t find my original Auto F/X Photographic Edges disc. I use that product to add interesting edges to photos on wickenburg-az.com. But I poked around on the Web and found an old article (and here’s another one) that explained how to add interesting edge effects with various built-in Photoshop filters. I created an effect I liked, turned it into a Photoshop action, and can now apply it without the overhead of the Auto F/X package.

It took quite a while to get all my music and photos from the backup hard disk to my nice, clean hard disk. But everything transfered over without problems and I can access everything just like I could before the reformat.

The result of all this work and worry? My computer is running great, with no unexplained pauses, unexpectedly quitting applications, or lockups. Was it worth it? Of course it was!

Oprah’s revenge

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Or Frey gets fried.

I wrote about my feelings on the James Frey scandal in a previous post.

Today, I’m spending the day nursing a cold (so I can fly tomorrow without coughing myself out of the sky), and have been surfing the ‘Net all day. I finally tracked down and read the latest on the Frey/Oprah situation. You can read a good article about it by Harriet Frey (no relation) on Salon.com, “Oprah’s revenge.” (If you’re not a Salon.com member, you’ll have to sit through a very short advertisement to read the article; it’s worth it.)

I also read a few of the dozens of comments following the article. The one that seems to echo my sentiments perfectly said, in part:

But maybe an underlying reason this subject has become so controverial is BECAUSE Frey’s story is just more drop in the seemingly endless river of bullshit Americans are compelled to swim through by a media addicted to conflating reality and fiction. Fictionalized truth may have been a groundbreaking, freeing approach for Capote. Several decades later though, the method has clearly reached the viral stage, detached from its original purpose and spread thoughout the culture, where it has become a primary tool of media types on the make, trying to distinguish themselves in a tough, highly competitive industry. As a reader, I want to trust an author. If it is a work of fiction, I can admire the writer’s skill and imagination; if it is non-fiction, I want to be able to rely on the author’s accuracy.

(I added the emphasis.)

Sadly, James Frey’s career is now made. It doesn’t matter if his writing is any good. The math says all. If only 25% of his readers like his book, it isn’t a big deal when he sells only 10,000 copies. But if he sells over a million? That’s 250,000 fans. He can thank Oprah for giving him the million plus readers he needs to assure his future success.