Blog
Welcome home from Work · Jun 03, 06:54 PM
Thank you cats. What a lovely welcome home from work!
— Adam Lofting
How to stop spam from website contact forms · Jun 01, 08:41 PM
If you run a website, for whatever reason, the chances are you want people to contact you. It should be easy, you just add your contact details to your website and wait for friendly emails of encouragement and the excited enquirers who desperately want to swap their money for your goods and services.
However, the world isn’t that nice and life isn’t that easy so soon enough, a nasty spam robot has found your website, found your email address and distributed all around the world – rendering your once neat and tidy inbox useless forever more.
As you can’t publish your email address online anymore, you rework the contact page on your website to include a form. That way, people can’t see your email address, but if they fill out the form, they can send a message which gets to your inbox anyway.
Everything seems fine, until you start getting funny messages in your inbox again. You get blank forms from web-spiders crawling your form, and then you get emails from your form full of code and links to dodgy websites. What’s happening?
Well, the nasty spam robot has found your website again, but now he is a bit more intelligent. He doesn’t just look for your email address, he also finds your contact form and fills it out with spam.
How to solve this? You need to add something to you form that real visitors can fill out, but spam robots can’t understand. This comes in the form of CAPTCHA fields. Usually disorted text hidden from the robots in an image file that you have to retype into another text box. You’ve probably seen these cropping up across the internet as websites toughen up their spam defences.
Lots of people started to develop their own CAPTCHA systems and mostly they worked well and cut out the spam. However, because the secret input code was hidden in an image file, this also made these forms innacessible to visually impaired people using a screenreader to navigate the website. To provide audio alternatives to this content put the functionality out of reach for most projects in terms of timescale and budget.
On my own projects, until now, I have opted to receive the form spam rather than prohibit contact from people using screen-readers but I have just found and implemented a solution that meets all of my needs. It is a ready made solution, a free solution and a solution that as a wonderful side-effect, helps with the digitizing of old books.
To find out more, visit reCAPTCHA
— Adam Lofting
How to add a thumbnail image using textpattern · May 24, 07:11 PM
To add a thumbnail image using textpattern, using the textile editor, simply use the following syntax:
<txp:thumbnail id="10" poplink="1" />
Where id is the id of an image uploaded using textpattern and poplink=1 makes the fullsize image popup in a new window.
— Adam Lofting
Practical Dropdown Poetry · May 15, 08:26 PM
I was feeling creative when I was laying out my contact form and ended with some accidental poetry.
— Adam Lofting
Redirection of mail · May 03, 08:11 PM
Wouldn’t it be confusing if you bought a house from someone who shared your name?
If John Smith setup a postal redirect for all his mail, then the other John Smith who is buying the house would lose his post to the redirect system. It could get very messy!
This must have happened to someone somewhere.
— Adam Lofting
Reading stories online · Apr 13, 09:29 AM
For those of you who know my online writing project Bibliofaction, you will know that one of the biggest difficulties we have to overcome is getting people to enjoy the process of reading online.
We wanted to make the process as much like reading a book as possible and I think our solution is pretty effective.
click here to read one of the stories on Bibliofaction
From a technical point of view, this is also Standards Compliant, Accessible, works with broser font sizes and degrades gracefully without javascript.
— Adam Lofting
Self reflection through self branding · Apr 08, 09:04 PM
Writing content for a website about yourself is a difficult thing to do.
Actually, let me correct that…
Writing content worth reading for a website about yourself is a difficult thing to do.
The only content worth writing about is content that will be of interest to other people.
The only content that is of interest to other people is the content that provides them with benefits.
The content can be personalised to make the process less formal, but in the end, unless you provide useful insights to your readers, they wont be readers for very long.
So you have to convince your readers that your insights are useful.
How do you do this?
By treating your own website in the same way you would any other company, brand or product:
Make sure you explain who you are and why you are qualified to write about the subjects you write about.
— Adam Lofting
How to go to market on a limited budget · Mar 17, 08:13 PM
This is just a quick post to highlight an article written by our Creative and Strategic Director at Flipside Group .
A limited budget shouldn’t stop you taking a product, company or brand to market – it just means you have to think more creatively. And afterall, thinking more creatively can only be a good thing. In the same way that a restrictive design brief should give any good designer a great place to start, a restrictive budget should give marketers a great source of inspiration for spending their money effectively.
Follow this link to read the full article: Successful marketing on a limited budget
— Adam Lofting
Is white-on-black the new black-on-white? · Mar 10, 08:26 PM
In Microsoft Expression Web 1, the software used a pretty standard windows interface. Black text on a white background.
With the release of Expression Web 2 Beta, the interface has had the colours ‘inverted’. The text for the menus is now white on a dark gray background. The controls themselves are still pretty standard but the colours have been changed.
This could be for a number of reasons including:
- Matching the interface to that of other products in the Expression suite (including Blend)
- Trying to give the products an edgier “alternative” feel to appeal to a broader audience
- It’s about the only thing you can do to make an HTML editor look different to every other HTML editor on the planet
But maybe, and this is just a maybe, this is actually based on some research into usability.
People who build websites for a living often spend long periods of time staring at computer screens and by inverting the colours on the screen, you greatly reduce the overall brightness of the ‘light’ you stare at all day. This can help with eye strain, particularly when working on a computer after daylight hours.
So, if you are developing web or desktop applications that will be used for long periods at the time, then you should take note of this design decision by Microsoft. It may just be a trend, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the long-term use of these colour schemes affects the user experience.
Is white-on-black the new black-on-white?
— Adam Lofting
Microsoft PHP with Intellisense · Mar 10, 08:14 PM
I’m testing out the Microsoft Expression Studio suite of tools and was both suprised and intrigued to see that Expression Web 2 Beta includes built in support for writing PHP documents with Intellisense.
I can only guess that this is a subtle ploy by Microsoft to make the open source programmers more familiar with the Microsoft environment before convincing them to make the switch to ASP.NET.
What are the odds of PHP becoming another .NET language in the future?
— Adam Lofting