Tag Archives: free

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.

A Penny Saved…

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I put Ben Franklin’s saying to the test.

Not long ago, I wrote a post explaining how someone could take advantage of a credit card introductory offer for a low (or no) interest cash advance, put the money in an ING CD (or some other high-paying, insured savings account), earn interest, and then pay off the credit card balance before the interest jumped up from its introductory rate. I calculated that I could earn about $700 on a $20,000 credit card cash advance.

Well this works both ways. Mike and I have a home equity line of credit, which we used a while back to buy our Howard Mesa property and a few other things. Back when we signed up for it, the interest rate was very low. But today, it’s 7.5%. Not exactly a great deal anymore.

Enter Capital One (for the sixth time in a week). This offer was 0% for purchases and balance transfers for a full year. Best of all, there were no balance transfer fees. According to the offer, I could get up to $30,000 of credit. And the balance transfer option could be applied to a loan.

You might know where this is going.

I did some math. What if I put $25,000 toward the home equity line of credit, thus reducing the balance by that huge amount? Over the course of a year, I’d save $1,875 in interest (that’s simple interest calculation, which is close enough for me). Then, before the credit card interest rates jumped into their double-digits, I’d write a check from the home equity line of credit to Capital One, thus paying off the entire balance before any interest could accrue.

Of course, I would have to make those minimum monthly payments to Capital One. But if I got into a problem with that, I could always use the home equity line of credit to pay that, too. Besides, my payments on the home equity would be reduced — perhaps by the same amount as the Capital One credit card. Wouldn’t that be a kick!

Understand that the net effect of this on my personal debt would be zero — I’m borrowing from Peter to pay Paul (so to speak). I’d just save a bunch of money in interest. And, like Ben Franklin said, a penny saved is a penny earned.

So I applied for the account with the transfer. Let’s see if I get it.

The odd thing is, I’ve been taking advantage of those year-long 0% interest offers for years. I usually have $10,000 to $20,000 floating around in interest-free debt with a credit card company. (I paid the last one off about six months ago, though, and haven’t applied for a new one since.) With all the credit information available to credit card companies these days, they must be able to figure it out. Yet they still offer me free money, I still take it, and I still pay them back in full before they can start the interest clock.

I win, they lose. And they keep coming back for more.

Go figure, huh?

Some Anniversaries are Best Not Celebrated

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March 20 marked three full years of a U.S. military presence in Iraq.

CasketsSadly, not everyone will come home.

Although the photos of flag-draped coffins at the Dover Air Force Base were hidden from the press, they were obtained from the military on request using the Freedom of Information Act. The photos, which are a sad, yet dignified, reminder of the loss of human life, can be found at The Memory Hole.

When I saw this one, I felt a need to share it with readers here.

The war in Iraq has been going on for entirely too long now. It was begun on false pretences and it continues with huge loss of life on both sides. And all we hear from the President and his spokespeople is spin.

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

– George W. Bush, May 1, 2003

That was nearly three years ago. How many people have died since then?

More recently, the Pres began to reveal his true thoughts on the War: it’s a mess that someone else will have to clean up:

Question: Will there come a day — and I’m not asking you when, not asking for a timetable — will there come a day when there will be no more American forces in Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: That, of course, is an objective, and that will be decided by future Presidents and future governments of Iraq.

– March 21, 2006 Press Conference

And more spin:

I wish I could tell you the violence in Iraq is waning and that all the tough days in the struggle are behind us. They’re not. There will be more tough fighting ahead with difficult days that test the patience and the resolve of our country. Yet, we can have faith in the final outcome because we’ve seen freedom overcome the darkness of tyranny and terror and secure the peace before. And in this century, freedom is going to prevail again.

– George W. Bush, March 29, 2006

With 94 years left in “this century,” I hope he’s right.

AmazonConnect

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I officially become an AmazonConnect Author.

If you regularly read these blogs, you may recall my rant against Amazon.com a few months ago. I was POed because Amazon offers free “Super Saver” shipping but, when you choose it, they delay your order. In my case, they tried to delay it for two months. Then, when I complained, they sent half my order and never sent the rest. The incident convinced me to switch to BN.com for my book buying needs. Their free shipping orders are shipped promptly and in full.

Unfortunately (or in some cases, fortunately), BN.com’s Web site lacks many of the features of Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, it lacks a decent Wish list feature. On BN.com, your wish list is yours alone and can’t be shared with others. How idiotic is that? My Amazon.com Wish List, however, can be shared with a link on a Web page or by e-mail. What better way to ensure that I get what I want for Christmas or my birthday each year?

Fortunately, BN.com lacks all the marketing junk that Amazon.com is constantly throwing at shoppers. I’m talking about recommendations, member lists, “the page you made,” and “also bought” lists. Sheesh. When are those guys going to give it up already? What really irks me is how often I connect and get a recommendation for a book that directly competes with one of mine.

The other day, I logged in to look up the availability of a book I heard about on NPR. Amazon recognized me immediately from one of the cookies it had stored in my computer. And it displayed what it calls a “plog” with a series of blog posts from a woman I’d never heard of. Turns out, this woman is an author and she evidently wrote a book that Amazon.com thinks I bought. (I don’t recall buying the book; it’s about new age healing and I don’t believe in most of that stuff.) The blog entries were of a “here’s what’s new” and “here’s how you can learn more about my books” nature — marketing through and through. I found the link sequence to make them go away.

There was also a link on my page that invited me to be one of the blogging authors. I guess they matched my name with names in their book database. (Enough to recognize me as an author, but not enough to stop recommending competing books. Oh, well.) I followed a bunch of links and got myself registered as an author with my own AmazonConnect blog.

i’m not sure how this works. It seems to me that if I write a blog entry, it might appear on pages for everyone who has purchased one of my books. Now although Amazon.com lists 68 titles for me, I only claimed about 10 as mine — no sense doing virtual paperwork for out-of-print titles. So I think that if you bought one of those 10 books and connected to your Amazon.com account, you might just see a blog entry from me.

Anyone out there qualified to try this? If you bought one of my books on Amazon.com, do try logging in to see if they push some of my prose at you. Then report back here, please, and use the Comments link to let us know.

Now this means I need to contribute to yet another blog. Just when I thought that I’d combine a bunch of my sites to reduce my blogging workload, there’s another blog to write for. But don’t worry — I won’t write nearly as much or as often there as I do here. And I won’t fill it with marketing bull.

There’s enough of that on Amazon without me adding to it.

Wickenburg Rotary

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I speak at a Rotary meeting in Wickenburg.

Can you believe it? The local Wickenburg Rotary invited me again as a speaker. I guess that with meetings every week, they must run out of new people to invite.

What did I talk about? I told them about my work as a writer and as a pilot. I showed them some recent books and left them as silent auction items for their upcoming Rotary Dinner. I lectured them on the importance of free speech and their duty to speak out about things that they think are wrong. I showed them some aerial photos of downtown Wickenburg that we’d taken for the Town Manager. I told them that if they were ever at the Grand Canyon, they should treat themselves to a helicopter ride.

I answered questions. Why I didn’t have a New Jersey accent. (Who wants one of those?) Whether I thought helicopter flights at the Grand Canyon were dangerous. (No.) What kind of plane Mike flew. (A Grumman Tiger.)

And that’s it. They applauded politely. A few of them shook my hand as they filed out. One of them stopped for a longer chat about his extensive collection of Wickenburg postcards; I’m trying to convince him to publish them in a book.

I didn’t embarrass myself. I didn’t make anyone angry. I did a fine job.

Heck, it was only 20 minutes. I could have gone on for hours.