Brussels web design blog

Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils

Nicely made flash site for an ads agency: Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils

Check it out!

Fighting spam and email harversters on your website: bad behavior

In the fight against spam, web developers couldn't do much except installing additional software like spamassassin on their webservers, which is really the webhoster 's job. And that doesn't stop all of it, far from it. Especially if you inherit a website that is all in html, contains thousands of pages, and a lot include your customer personal email address, the one he really can't change, you know? Like firstname(Replace this blurb with the @ sign)lastname.com or something... Like i just did

So i had to find an easy and efficient way to protect all these pages, blocking email harvesters and spambots BEFORE they could actually parse the pages and collect their victims.

Enters (again) one of your best spam-nuke weapons: Bad Behavior by Michael Hampton .

How to protect a html only website from spambots and email harvesters:

1. Make sure your webserver has PHP 4.3.+ enabled
2. Download Bad Behavior
3. FTP to your site, create a folder that will contain bad behaviour core scripts (personally, i use a "_lib" library for all my scripts, and have my "badBehavior_antispam" folder inside. I name it like this so if another developer inherits the website, he gets what this folder contains without having to dig into the code)
4. Create (or update) a .htaccess file, by adding this piece of code:

an example of the localpath:

Don't know the absolute local path of your website ? Upload a php file containing the following bit of code and then browser to it, it will display the local path to the root of your site:

That's about it! Your site is protected from email harvesters and spam bots!

[UPDATE:] i've found out (the hard way) that this may break php script if your server 's php.ini file has short_open_tag = Off. (that is: < ? instead of < ?php) 

So make sure you either always use < ?php or set the php.ini variable short_open_tag = On 

Geo De Vlamynck redesigned

Today, I redesigned the small Geo De Vlamynck website, one of my very first designed website (i was not earning a living out of it at the time). I had to do this because with the theft of my laptop in january, i lost all the flash source files. So i only kept the one SWF file that is not replaçable, and switched to a clean xhtml/css layout. I also used 4mir's Greybox script to launch a nice dhtml modal window . Unfortunately, i couldn't make it work with that old swf file, since i don't have the .fla anymore. Ah, Bugger.I started working on it at 22:06 and it is now 3:10 AM. From layouting and information architecture to developing the html/css/php files. Five hours, not too bad is it? But then, that's very simple material... Yet i had to retype all the texts, because they where also not accessible from within the bunch of swf... So no, really, 5 hour ain't too bad

Wouaoh, now to bed...

Requirements of a good navigation system

C'mon guys, give that ajax script a rest and go back to the basics of what makes a good navigation system !

Read it all at A List Apart: Articles: Where Am I? by Derek Powazek

In short, make sure your navigation systems answers 3 questions:

1. Where am i?
2. Where have i been?
3. Where can i go?

And Tips:

1. Avoid links to the page you're on!
2. Show where you are
3. Think before you add a link to your main navigation, ask yourself: “Will users really need this link every single time they visit?”