Peterbe.com

Stu's Site has a nice example of a way of preventing email harvesting by writing the email in reverse and then letting stylesheets reverse it when rendering. The HTML source looks like this:

<style type="text/css">
.backwards {unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;}
</style>
<span class="backwards">ku.oc.u7s@uts</span>

And the result is: stu@s7u.co.uk. It works on in my web browsers (win, linux), but the nasty effect is that if you select the text, copy and paste; when you paste it pastes it as ku.oc.u7s@uts. Pretty annoying.

My site uses hex encoding so the HTML looks like this:

<script language="JavaScript">eval(unescape('%64%6F...lots of these...%29'))</script>
<noscript>Peter, mail(at)peterbe dot com</noscript>

The result is as if no anti-harvesting effect had been applied.

Sadly I bet that spammers have tricks to get around both but what matters is how few spammers have yet to come up with the solution. I'm thinking of keeping my method and adding something that scrambles up the encoded string to break spammers regular expressions. But the effect mustn't be as bad as the example on Stu's site.

I've been looking for good CSS (stylesheet) articles that don't just teach the basics which I already know. This one looks pretty good so I write it down for later reading.

A List Apart has many good articles for high-level web development. Sadly many of the CSS articles are pretty old so there's (with todays measure) too much talk about non-supporting browsers. I suspect a lot has happened in the last year that will enable me to try the bleeding-edge CSS techniques.

"The IssueTrackerProduct"n:http://www.IssueTrackerProduct.com is my proud open source project that actually has become quite popular. My survey has received more than 150 reviews; some with comments like "Yours is by far the best thing i've seen".

I was starting to loose interest in it but the motivation is back again. People appreciate it and there are several new web development areas I have yet to discover and do more research in. For several months I've been thinking about a way to integrate a Knowledge Base into it and finally I think I have come up with a solution. It's all in my head so far but getting it there is a much bigger challenge than actually coding it.

Now I've written a little Future Plan that I intend to work by and keep updating. The pace will be sporadically slow until summer since I need to focus hard enough on my last university year, but I will not give up and there is also the plan of trying to make money on this through my company. (Don't worry, it'll still be Open Source, but we might charge for customisation, corporate features or ASP)

Ploggle is a site where people can collect photos and videoclips they take with their mobile. You sign up for free and then you take a picture with your mobile and send it to Ploggle or your can send images by email.

All in all I think Ploggle is great. I happen to know one of the founders, Daniel Light, from the Kung Fu club. I know that he is working hard on it and recently they've updated the code quite a lot.

The site is really user-friendly which of course is highly appreciated. From a marketing point of view I think they do a great job making it easy for people to sign up. The service is free but if you want to upload more than 30 pictures you'll have to pay a small amount. You can also password protect uploading of pictures.

This month I present to you: Infinite Illusions Catalog. And shopping site where you can buy yo-yos and juggling equipment.

Let me start complaining, let me know if you can find any more that I forget to mention:

• Welcome page; gives few clues as to what the site is about.
• Frames; impossible to copy the URL of a particular page.
• No Home link; logo at top is not clickable. If you've clicked Juggling equipment, how do you get to Yo-Yos and Tops?
• Useless feature; What's the f**ing point with the Expand-, Collapse-menu link?
• Messy; Loads of different design elements.
• URLs; Individual items don't have a URL of their own.
• Help manual; (opens in a new window) does it have to be hard to shop.

The only good thing about the site is that it loads very fast. My guess is that they update every single page statically with MS Frontpage.

I have recently been thinking about writing a Knowledge Base web application, but so far it's only the research stage. Today I saw the MozillaZine Knowledge Base which was good inspiration. They seem to have some completely different types of pages. FAQ's, comparison sheets, tips and normal articles.

That is something I hope to have. The type of any piece of knowledge must be considered meta-data. I.e. the structure is separate from the data.

The MozillaZine Knowledge Base sure looks impressive. Do you know any other knowledge bases that you think is impressive?

PayPalSucks.com is a webpage about how bad PayPal is. It lists all the main reason for why it sucks and a forum (well used it looks) for peoples own horror stories.

This can't be good for PayPal. Maybe the page is secretly supported by one it its rivals. Or, some smart ass sets the site up and then expects a large donation from PayPal corp. for taking the site down.

At work we used WorldPay, and the only bad thing I've found about them is this piece about the customisation

Simon Willison has written a nice article about Simple tricks for more usable forms and from it I learned about how <label> tags work. They have been part of HTML since 1998 so today most browsers should support them; and if not, it's not a show-stopper. What they do is that they help to associate a text with an input field. For example, here, mouseclick the word "Name" and "Agree?" below.

"robots.txt" is a file you can create on your site to help indexing bots to index your site correctly. These bots first scans your robots.txt file to see which pages to ignore.

This page is a good tool to keep in mind to validate your robots.txt files. robotstxt.org has more information about the wannabe standard.

My near-future hope is to set up my own weblog where each new blog item is my write-up of notes from my math lectures. The purpose of this is twofold:

• Study my notes from lectures
• Learn more about web development with odd content/format

I then need to be able to write mathematical expressions in my HTML using TeX syntax and have the expressions converted to images. TeX (father of LaTeX (father of Itex)) looks like this:

\[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n} \text{ is divergent, 
but }  \lim_{n \to \infty} \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{i}
- \ln n \text{ exists.}\]