Hiding your emails on your website can be very tricky and the method should be chosen wisely. Yeah, its our war against email harvesters! Just now i have read the outcome of an interesting study made by Silvan Mühlemann. In his research he used nine different methods to obfuscate the email on his page. He created an email address for each method and was keeping track of the incoming spam for 1.5! years. Here is the outcome:

(source: Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared)

Amazing! The simplest methods using CSS had the best results. No Spam at all. There is just one question: How long will it take for the harvesters to adapt their algorithms to this research results?

(If you’re interested to see the detailed implementation of those methods just check the original article. I have skipped it.)

SmartBear Software released a book called “Best kept secrets of Peer code review”. Title sound interesting and its even free. I have just ordered my copy today (unfortunately there are shipping costs involved outside US) and looking forward to the secrets ;) Grab yours guys.

(Btw: this is my first post using an external tool for blogging - BlogDesk. Works perfect!)

Did you ever wanted to stay up to date with websites/pages which actually don’t offer any feed(s)? Yeah me too! page2rss.com/ is our life saver. It let us subscribe to any webpage and thus monitor all its changes. I love it! my sleepless nights are gone now, cause i know i won’t miss anything anymore …

Many of you already know that the FamFamFam icons are probably the most famous out there. At least i know plenty of apps using it - including me. Today i have found a new great icon set from pro theme design including 117 icons:

Get Circular Icons here

When working with Ruby on Rails on a windows machine you will sometimes need the development console or the interactive ruby console (irb). Actually you need it quite often :) If you do so you’ll discover that special character like the tilde (~) or the {}-brackets are not supported there. Why? I don’t know but let me know if you know the reason. However, to solve this problem just create a file which has the following content:


“\M-[”: “[”
“\M-]”: “]”
“\M-{”: “{”
“\M-}”: “}”
“\M-\\”: “\\”
“\M-|”: “|”
“\M-@”: “@”
“\M-~”: “~”
“\M-?”: “?”


save this to e.g. c:\.inputrc and put the following to your irb.bat (which is usually located in c:\ruby\bin\) straight after the @echo off line:

SET INPUTRC=C:\.inputrc

Now you should be a more happier Rails dev.. At least i am. (I found this information at flip’s blog - Thanks!)

Android is the new operating system from Google for mobile devices available for free since this weeks Monday. It is very amazing what the new operating system is able to do (see in the movie embedded in the bottom) but the most interesting thing is that they give away 10.000.000 US-Dollars for the best applications which will be developed with its SDK. (more…)

Vitamin has released a nice post called Pragmatic reporting for your web apps. The article outlines which figures could be interesting to analyze and briefly describes how to aggregate all this data into one dashboard. This information can help find future decisions more easier. It reminds me of the when I and Fab ran the community mailfriends.com. Our main key figure used to be “last signups during 24 hours” and our goal was to keep it as high as possible. We generated our own reports according to this figure. Beside that we also analyzed the users origin country which gave us information about the popularity of the community in different countries.

I was browsing Google code search the other day and stumble over some funny comments within code snippets of others. Some of them are really creative and it was good to see that its not only me and Fab who are having fun when writing some weird stuff. Programming has to be fun :) I have collected the best one below… (more…)

because you could have a lead developer like her …. ;)

So guys work hard and maybe you can join the pownce development team. There is just one question: could you really concentrate on your code? Btw pownce is a brand new community which allows you to share files amongst your friends or even the public. It is invitation only but maybe you are lucky.

The Smashing magazine selects every month one of the most interesting web-development related websites. They check and analyze recent tools, tutorial and trends and sum them up in a nice to read list. The current list (May/June 2007) can be found here. Browsing this list helps me to keep up to date without spending too much time of doing my own research. This time interesting amongst others:

• Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design
• Focus Clouds
• SlickSpeed Selectors Test - speed test of Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, ext, cssQuery and Dojo Query
• Web 2.0 in Germany: Copy/Paste Innovation or more? Facebook = StudiVZ
• The secret of Apple Design

Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07…