I have my final call of 2011 in 6 minutes, so I decided to take a break from packing and wish everyone joyous and festive holiday, whatever you celebrate. We’re on hiatus through Jan 8th, but will return full of energy, single malt and ideas.
We didn’t get a tree up this year, so I have no photos of our cats playing tree ornament. So I share with you my friend Joanna’s cat, in his Christmas tree.
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.
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:
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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