New Blog Design

After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog.
While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features:

  • Everything should render cleanly in most any browser
  • Search works!
  • The archives, over on the right hand side, are a lot easier to navigate
  • If you visit the blog from your cellphone you’ll get a nice layout customized for the smaller screen
  • Down at the bottom of each post are some little badges that’ll let you share the article via twitter or facebook or digg or …
  • The little badges also let you send the article via email, or convert it to a print-friendly PDF
  • There’s a live-ish feed of Laura and I on twitter on the right hand side
  • If you post a comment you’ll find that we generate a little monster avatar for you, if you don’t have a gravatar set up
  • Our RSS feed for new comments is a bit more visible than it was

We’ll be tweaking things over the next couple of weeks – if you see any problems comment here or email us

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Traveling again!

I’m headed off early tomorrow morning to help celebrate a friend’s wedding (Hi Al!). I’ll be back at work on Tuesday and blogging will be back on schedule.

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Contact addresses and spam

One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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Recent comments

On my followup EEC post Tamara comments

The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?

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