Tag Archives: web design

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.

WordPress Power

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I start to tap into the power of WordPress for Web publishing.

WordPress is an Open Source blogging tool. At least that’s how it’s promoted. But it’s so much more than that.

WordPress is a highly customizable Web publishing platform. With WordPress, a server, and a little ingenuity, you can build a Web site with nicely formatted static and dynamic pages. New content can be added by anyone you give access to. Site visitors can add comments — if you allow them to. Best of all, because it’s based on a blog engine, blogging features apply: date-based content display, automatic archiving of content, support for pinging and trackbacks — the list goes on and on.

I started getting a real feel for WordPress when I started rebuilding wickenburg-az.com, a Web site I have been maintaining since 1999 to provide information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. I started off keeping it simple, choosing a nice looking theme called Connections by Patricia Muller to control the appearance of the site. I immediately started tweaking the theme, changing the link colors and the header image. Then, after I had some content added, I continued tweaking by adding more features: automatic article author images, Webcams, random list of articles on topics pages, random header images, site statistics, weather, donation button, calendar of upcoming events, and Technorati tags. I added some “under the hood” features, too: comment spam protection, automated database backup, and sticky posts (which can glue a post to the top of the Home page until I release it). Right now, I’m trying to add the Users Online feature I have on this site, but I’m running into a page formatting problem and still need to work out the details to get it to work.

Every change I make to the site teaches me something about the way WordPress works. I learn more about HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, and Apache every day. For years, I’ve avoided digging deeply into advance Web publishing coding because I knew so little about it. Now I’m forcing myself to learn by working with it daily. I love the challenge. And I love applying the things I learned yesterday to the things I do tomorrow.

I’ll be writing more about WordPress in the weeks to come, so if you’re a WordPress user or are just curious about it, I hope you’ll keep checking in. Together, we’ll learn more about this great Web publishing tool.

Welcome to the New Home of Maria’s WebLog

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I combine Maria’s WebLog and the Maria Langer Web site into one site, using WordPress software.

You’re looking at the new home of Maria’s WebLog, which I’m in the process of combining with my personal Web site. If you’ve been following my WebLog, you know that I recently installed Mac OS X server on my old G4 and made the switch to WordPress to rebuild the wickenburg-az.com Web site I host there. This is the second big project for that server, and it’s quite a challenge. Not only do I have to get hundreds of pages of content from both sites together in one central place, but I have to modify the theme on which the appearance of the site is based — without knowing nearly enough CSS or PHP code to get the job done easily.

I do love a challenge.

So bear with me as I get this site put together. Your suggestions and comments are always welcome. Use the Comments link to let me and other visitors know what’s on your mind.