One of the couple of items on my “should add to the blog sooner or later” list, is to develop the “Contact me” page a bit more—you know, so that people who would like to get in touch with me for genuine reasons, can actually do so.
No prizes for what’s mostly stalling forward progress (well, apart from the usual ‘lack of time’): spam. It’s one of the things you learn in “Building A Web Site 101″, that you never, if it is at all possible to avoid, place your e-mail address on a Web site without some form of obfuscation, unless you wish to spend the remaining lifespan of your e-mail address fighting off hordes of unwanted junk.
Oh yes, there are ways to mitigate against the problem, most notably Hivelogic’s Enkoder (this generates a scrambled, encrypted JavaScript version of your e-mail address which supposedly fends off the automatic “spider” scripts which harvest unprotected addresses off Web pages). I’ve used this in the past, and would do so again, but it seems to me that as long as you place an e-mail address on a public-facing Web page, there is the chance that somehow it will find its way into a spammer’s address list.
The present contact form on my blog allows visitors to send me messages without exposing the e-mail address which the form uses (at least, I hope that is the case), but even then, I have received gibberish messages from the form (three in the last two days alone). These are especially annoying for me, as they are seemingly random collections of alphanumeric characters (not other languages) with dodgy-looking URLs I would have to be seriously drugged to even consider following. (I wish I could ask these dolts politely to stop insulting my intelligence and wasting their time and my bandwidth, but of course it’s not costing them anything, and if just one fool follows a link and gets his PC “0wn3d” by every virus that can squeeze onto the hard drive, then it’s 1-0 to the spammers.)
Moreover, I’ve never added my home address, phone number(s) or any really personal information to any Web site of mine in the past fifteen years, and I’m not about to start now—if I want to give this information to someone, I’ll find a “one-to-one” way which is less likely to compromise the ‘defences’.
So, I have to be honest and say that I don’t think I’ll be adding a great deal more to the “contact” page at Sidingsound, at least for the time being. It’s not that I want to keep people at arm’s length (well, aside from the spammers, obviously), and if my intention was to cut myself off totally from two-way contact on the Internet, I wouldn’t be blogging (and certainly wouldn’t allow comments here, if you think about it). For example, I have public ways for people to interact with me online ( my Twitter account , to name but one), but whilst I’m often on Skype, I’ll tend to give my ID there only to people who ask for it, and/or I would like to be contacted by via that route.
In the meantime, if you would like to reach me, there’s always the comments feature on this blog, and the good old “Contact me” form, At least, until I get fed up with all the spam from it and close it down 
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Posted by Wordmobi
(Updated later on the 21st August 2009 with a couple of links and nips/tucks; wasn’t quite happy with the post, but Wordmobi doesn’t allow me to submit posts to WordPress as drafts, as far as I know.)
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