Arranged Delirium

A couple of unrelated notes that I’m stuffing together into this one post:

1) I’ve been amazed this term by how few of my students know Jeff Bezos. Here’s a Wired article for the uninitiated. Of course, like most tech leaders, you’ll find both lovers and haters; but if you actually do a little research, you’ll be able to develop an informed opinion…

B) We’ll be talking about CMS software soon, and I was struck by a recent quote from Matt Mullenweg, referring to users of enterprise software: ‘How come the [content management system] that my company spent $4 million for is crappier than the thing I use for my blog, that I pay $12 a year for?’ Good question. You can read more here.

Education doesn’t need technology. It’s not a popular position, but not thinking about the topic leaves us open to a rather ignorant acceptance of the Modern ideology that progress is necessary and all technology is “good.” In any event, it’s interesting to see what’s going on in California where many tech leaders chose to send their children to decidedly non-tech schools. Why might that be? Here’s a recent article that describes the phenomenon, but it’s nothing new - tech leaders have been doing this for years. True, it’s anecdotal evidence, but isn’t it possible that they know something because of their experiences in the field?

Students in web design are creating (possibly) a new web site for the ITL department. But one thing that is always important to me is making sure that everyone know how to publish email links without just putting them out there for spam-bots to harvest. There are all sorts of complicated ways to prevent this; but there are also some very simple ways that can limit the nefarious spam industry. Here are the simple ones in order of complexity:

1) You simply use the [amp#64;] character instead of the @ sign in your code. This is quite easy; but there are numerous email harvesting spiders that can reconstruct this, so the amount of protection is very minimal.

2) You could also use characters or even type the address differently to obfuscate the address: name (at) washjeff _dot_ edu. This works a bit better, but depending on the formulae, most of these have been cracked; and from a user-interface perspective it can create effort on the part of the sender. This is a less than ideal solution if you actually want people to contact you. Plus, its pretty easy to de-munge.

3) In your code you could replace the actual text with hex values for the characters. This provides a bit more protection that the steps above, but there are still bots that can crack it. That being said, unless you are attracting spammers, it’s probably enough protection. Most certainly, it’s better than nothing! You can find tools online that will generate this for you. This is probably the course of action that you want to take if you are avoiding javascript.

4) You can use javascript to obfuscate the email address. As long as users have javascript enabled, they will see a clickable email address, but the bots will encounter javascript. It’s only a matter of time until this process becomes less effective; but thus far it still works well for me and the organizations I’ve done development for. I use the online tool Enkoder to generate the javascript for me. Supper-easy.

Of course there are better ways to do this - you could create a form, use captchas (annoying), or use a php script to protect email addresses. But truthfully, the javascript method works well enough unless you are being targeted and it is much better than just posting the email address out there where anyone can see it. Publicly broadcasting email addresses is a sure indicator of novice development - you don’t want to do it.

I had a student yesterday that needed to resize a good number of images. I told him to go look for some online tutorials (and there is 1 good one) but many of them were, well, more difficult than they needed to be. So, for student of new media, here’s how you resize multiple files at once:

Step 1) File menu -> Scripts -> Image Processor…
Step 2) Identify the source directory
Step 3) Identify the destination directory
Step 4) Make your desired changes
Step 5) Click the Run button

Thats it. There are a number of other options you can select if you know what you are doing, and as usual - you’re mileage many vary if you are using earlier versions. (For instance, I think the sub-folders option only came around in CS4, so if you are using the machines downstairs with CS3 you are out of luck.) Another tip: If you are at all confused about file locations and directory structures, do yourself a favor and just make two folders on the desktop: one with all the images you want to modify, and another one for where you want the new images to appear.

Students in ITL 275: Web Design and Development are developing a new site for the ITL department here at W&J. Part of the process includes determining the audience and identifying who you are trying to serve. This seems like a good point to remind everyone of NetMarketShare which hosts monthly breakdowns of web content access by device and platform:

Some interesting notes - IE still makes up over 50% of desktop browsers. This isn’t as horrible as it once was, since both IE8 and IE9 are acceptable browsers; but 13% of users are still employing IE6 and IE7, meaning that there’s a whole lot of content that they can’t get to unless the developers are conscientious enough to query for the browser version and push out a different stylesheet.

Another resource for students is the Web Style Guide (2nd). Ignore the third edition - it goes too far afield for the work we’ll do this term.