Drawing on the Web

Do you post your email address on your web site?

Almost all of us do — we almost have to do this — but that makes it easily harvestible by spammers’ spiders.

There are some tricks you can use to make your email address available to visitors but not for the robot spiders…

First, you can use one of several JavaScript encryption systems. These are designed to have your encrypted email address within the JavaScript, but to use the visitor’s web browser to decode and display the address.

This works fine when the user has JavaScript turned on… but doesn’t work at all if she has turned off JavaScript (ActiveScript in Internet Explorer) for security reasons.

The second method is the one that I normally use — it’s called Spam-me-not. Although the web page says that it uses JavaScript, it really doesn’. It simply encodes the individual characters of the email address into mixed decimal and hexadecimal HTML character codes.

For example, the character “t” can be coded as “t” or as “t” or as a “t” — and the web browser will understand, decode and display a “t” character.

Fortunately, for now, the spiders aren’t that smart…