Email obfuscation is a useful technique to use to stop spammers from finding your email address (as opposed to the more common “munging” where you write “me [at] blah [dot] com”). An obfuscated email address is unreadable to humans and most robots in the source code, but is rendered correctly in a browser, and will function correctly in a mailto link. I’ve found it works well…but it’s a pain in the arse to do by hand. There are free online tools that will obfuscate an email address for you, but what if you want an automatic solution.

I didn’t know this until WordPress Garage pointed it out, but it seems that WordPress has a built-in obfuscation function. It’s called antispambot().

The function antispambot() above parses the e-mail address passed by get_the_author_email() (this is the same as the_author_email(), except it returns rather than displays the author’s e-mail address). Use of the echo command displays the output of antispambot(). An interesting feature is it encodes only portions of an address, and does so randomly so the letters encoded are different each time the page loads, adding a little more firepower to the spam protection arsenal.

The wiki page on WordPress.org has an example on how to use the function.

Web applications, or web apps, have, in my opinion, one huge advantage over “normal” programs. I’m sure you can guess what it is before you finish reading this.

I just got a new Apple MacBook, as I’ve Twittered about, told everyone I know on Facebook, and all but made a T-Shirt that says “I have a MacBook.” I’ve been trying to adjust to the new (to me) platform, and adapt my daily patterns.

Surprisingly, I haven’t had many problems with old Windows habits (e.g. reaching to the top-right corner to close a window). My biggest issues have been with software. Some familiar applications have Mac versions thankfully. (If there wasn’t a Mac version of Firefox, I wouldn’t have been so quick to want to get a Mac.)

I had to find some Mac equivalents of some programs, like NeoOffice to replace Microsoft Works, and CyberDuck to replace FileZilla. (FileZilla is great, and there is a Mac version, but it behaves oddly, lacking a normal window, and extending down from the menu bar.)

Luckily, my transition (so far) has been easier than it could have been, thanks to web apps. I use Google Apps for my email, so I didn’t have to migrate my email to Apple’s Mail App. I use my own MyNT RSS reader for my feed reading needs, so, again, I was okay there. (On a related note, MyNT 2.0 is in the works, and it will be a couple lightyears ahead of the current iteration.) If not for MyNT, I’d have had to find a good feed aggregator for Mac OS X, and then muck around with CSV or OPML export/import to move my feeds over. (more…)

Do you have too many email accounts? Up until a few days ago, I did too. Every day I’d check several accounts for new messages, which took longer than I liked.

My tip for today is too merge all of your email down into one account. GMail, and Google Apps, make this fairly easy. If you have a domain, I recommend using Google Apps. It’s much cooler to have you@yourdomain.com instead of domainlessguy73@gmail.com.

Once your new GMail-based email account is set-up, head over to the “Accounts” tab on the settings screen. Here you will configure your account to be the one place you go to check your email.

(more…)