On this wonderful day in America let’s never forget what we are truly celebrating. This is the day to celebrate our freedom. Also our day to celebrate our unity as a nation. We are people who have gathered from all over the world into a diverse population of the free. Let’s celebrate that ability to live side-by-side in this glorious nation today.

Remember to share with one another today. Help those who don’t have what you have. Celebrate our diverse unity.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The NCAA this week announced a formal program limiting how often bloggers with media credentials can update their blog while attending championship college events.

The sports governing body set blogging limits for each sport. For example, those at football games can update their blogs three times per quarter and once at halftime. For basketball, bloggers can post five times per half, once at halftime and twice per overtime period.

When did it all come to this? It used to be acceptable to post to your blog once a month, or for the over-zealous, once a week. But 12 times WHILE watching a championship college basketball game?

Nowadays, the standard seems to be at least once per day for avid (non-media) bloggers. Personally I’m still lucky if I can squeeze once a week into my schedule! So am I not typical any more? Have the standards changed? I’d love to hear your blogging habits. How often do you post, and when you do, is it just “Hey, the weather stinks today!”, or do you really have profound posts every time?

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The days of the mailto: email link should be long gone, but unfortunately there are still millions of those type of links out there. I don’t necessarily mean unfortunately for you or me; I mean unfortunately for the millions of people who are the poor recipients of email from such links out there.

There are thousands of nasty little spambots out there just searching the web hour after hour, zeroing in on that little snippet of code known as a mailto: email link. Bingo, when they find one, the email address that comes immediately after mailto: in the link will be massively bombarded over time with spam. Did you ever really wonder how that poor widow in Nigeria got your email address?

Every good web design company has an even better web programmer. That web programmer can spend up to 1/3 of his or her time just trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers and spammers. In larger companies, it can be a full time job.

The mailto: spam debacle is generally one of the easier problems to troubleshoot, and I’ve seen many different workarounds.

Some people just type out their email address but don’t make it a link. This is fine, but it forces the person who wants to email you to have to write it down, or copy it over to their email program in order to email you. That’s where human error enters the picture.

Some are even afraid to type out their full email address on a web page so they take that human error factor one step deeper and tell people to email them at myname at mysite.com.

Now, I’ve also seen some ingenious workarounds. I’ve seen code that turns typed email addresses into images of the letters because the spambots can’t read text in images. That one is pretty cool!!! But it’s also pretty complicated for the average site.

My favorite solution is a simple javascript, placed in an external javascript page. I’m so fond of it that I’m about to share it with you. Copy and paste the following into your external javascript page, or just in the head area of your page:

<script type=”text/JavaScript”>
<!- -
  function myEmail(prt1,prt2,id,subject){
    //redirect to mailto
    if (subject == undefined ){
      window.location = ‘mailto:’+ prt1 +’@'+ prt2;
    }else{
      window.location = ‘mailto:’+ prt1 +’@'+ prt2 + ‘?Subject=’ + subject;
    }
    return false;
  }
- ->
</script>

Now instead of the mailto: email link in the body of your document use this:

<a href=”javascript:void(0);” onClick=”myEmail(‘myname’,'mysite.com’,this,’Website Contact’);” title=”Click here to email us”>email us</a>

Now how cool is that?! And if you think about it, how much more simple could it be?

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