At the bottom of each of my web pages, I have a footer that looks something like this:

Having my email address so easily accessible for so many years (hewgill.com celebrates its 10th anniversary next year) has undoubtedly helped contribute to the incredible volume of spam I get. However, I don't want to reduce the usability and accessibility of my site, and if people would like to click on my email address to email me, they should be able to. Therefore I have refused to obfuscate my email address as it is published on my own web site.

It occurred to me that the risk of an automated email harvester robot picking up my email address could be reduced significantly by using a bit of javascript. If I avoid mentioning the actual email address as literal text in the HTML source, then the email harvester robots will probably miss it. Here's the code I used:

function email_address(a) {
    for (i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
        document.write(a[i]);
        if (i == 0) {
            document.write('@');
        } else if (i+1 < a.length) {
            document.write('.');
        }
    }
}
function email_link(a) {
    document.write("<a href=\"mailto:");
    email_address(a);
    document.write("\">");
    email_address(a);
    document.write("</a>");
}

Then, in the HTML source where you want to use a clickable email address, do something like the following:

In this way, users whose browsers understand Javascript will be able to see a clickable link just as the example at the top of this post. However, automated email harvester robots won't see anything resembling an email address, so they won't pick it up. It seems unlikely to me that an email harvester would go to the trouble of actually executing embedded javascript code (if they do, I can think of a lot more fun things to do to them).

One risk with this method is it makes the email address unusable for somebody whose browser does not understand Javascript. However, with so many sites using "Ajax" and other Javascript-based technologies to offer routine functionality, I think this is a small risk today.

Having said all that, I still haven't deployed this method on my own web site. But it's live on Amy's web site if you want to see it in action.

One of the reasons I wrote ljdump was to use the backup copy to generate a simple HTML presentation of my journal directly on my web site. This is duplicating some of the functionality that is already available on livejournal itself, but I believe my presentation is much easier to navigate especially when you're looking in the archives for a particular post by topic or date.

My journal is here. The year links near the top permit navigation by date; the tag keywords below that permit navigation by topic. (I went back and added tags to all my previous posts.)

If you're interested in trying this out for yourself, let me know and I'll send you the code. You'll also need the following:

• Python
• ljdump
• XT

You will need to edit the XSLT to generate something that fits into your web site layout instead of looking like it came from mine.

I've always used the LOC to Maps web page to check to see whether my DNS LOC records work properly. I decided to try to rewrite this application using modern web technologies to see how well it would work.

The result is my DNS LOC lookup page. This page is all done with Javascript and XML-RPC and Google Maps with a Python XML-RPC back-end.

Some names to try might be:

• hewgill.net
• macnugget.org
• ivo.nu
• yahoo.com

Let me know whether it works for you and if you find any problems!

The common www part of web server addresses has annoyed me for a long time. It's unnecessary, ugly, and annoying to pronounce. There is even a site, no-www, that is dedicated to the effort of eliminating the www wart on web addresses.

dbaker today pointed me to an easy way to eliminate the www using Apache. Instead of using the cumbersome mod_rewrite as suggested on the no-www site, do something like this:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName www.example.com
    Redirect permanent / http://example.com/
</VirtualHost>

Then, remove the ServerName www.example.com line from the real server configuration section. This assumes that you are using NameVirtualHost, which isn't the default but probably should be.

This configuration quietly redirects any URL with www to the corresponding URL without. This improves the way your URL looks, improves search engine efficiency, and promotes world peace. Well, maybe not that last thing.

As a followup to goulo's post about other people linking directly to images on a different server, I finally put together some stats on image inlining from my own server.

The new Image Linking Hall of Shame is the result of my efforts at gathering some statistics on this. The amount of traffic that a single message board post can generate (such as the one at crapforum.nl) is quite surprising.

In comparison to the rest of my server, the amount of traffic generated by image inlining is small. So I'm not really concerned about that aspect of inlining. The thing that bothers me is that people seem to feel free to use my images without mentioning the source. I don't think a single one of the other sites currently listed in the Hall of Shame mention where the picture came from, or offer a link back to where it was found.

The above reason is why I added the copyright notices to all the images in my image gallery. Under United States copyright law, such a notice is not required to be present to ensure at least a minimal level of copyright protection. However, adding the notice serves a few purposes:

• Remind people that the image is in fact a copyrighted work
• Provide a URL link (though unfortunately it can't be clickable) back to the source
• Include the image caption, if available.

A somewhat more audacious use of somebody else's images is to present them and then claim them as your own. Somehow, "HondaH8r" likes driving my car, and claims to have had problems with it. That's news to me!

Finally, I know that if I don't mention this myself, at least one reader will feel obliged to mention that it's easy to replace an existing image with a different one of, shall we say, questionable taste, or to use mod_rewrite to automatically augment or replace images served via an off-site referer. Hopefully my position is clearer now - I don't really mind people using my images as long as they say where it came from. My image annotations should help people do this without having to think about it.