Arranged Delirium

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.

Adobe appears to have thrown in the towel recently regarding flash development - at least for mobile devices. Reuters has an good article on the topic here. This clears most of the remaining barrier for the broad-based acceptance of HTML 5 as the development platform of choice for web development and web-based mobile apps.

This really shouldn’t be too surprising. Adobe has updated Dreamweaver in version 5.5 to be a viable mobile app development platform, and it’s bought out other text editors that might have fulfilled a significant competitive role. This does however make the forthcoming Adobe Edge product more appealing as well. In combination with the PhoneGap API libraries that you can access through Dreamweaver, this tool could enable app creators to include a significant amount of interactivity.

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.

In Web Design we’ve been deconstructing College web sites all term. Now its time to start some comparisons - particularly since we now have the language (theoretically) to speak intelligently about it. There are a couple of web resources that can help us.

1) Smashing Magazine has a Showcase of Academic and Higher Education Websites that you can access. This is at least somewhat curated, but questionable in places. In any event it is at least a culled collection rather than a simple listing of edu sites. It’s over a year old so it’s getting dated, but it’s still a fine place to find items for discussion.

2) eduStyle is a site designed for professionals working on college sites (web content folks, graphic designers, etc.). Any site can be listed on here, but anyone can rate it as well - so there’s little if any editorial process. They do however have an awards program that is judged, so you might want to focus on the winners for examples and ideas.

I’m afraid the W&J site does not score well at eduStyle, although there haven’t been many votes. The info there is from the old site too, so the new redesign would need to be listed; but given the functionality issues, I don’t think we’d do well.