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The comment about obfuscating email addresses led me to look for Javascript functions that reverse a string, or translate characters á la PHP’s strtr() function.

Of course, they don’t exist natively, so here are my versions that extent the String class:

Schedule_At was a PEAR class I wrote in 2003. It was a quick, hack-y interface to the command-line at scheduler from within PHP.

Based on an email query I received today, I’m making it directly available here. Enjoy!

I’ve been using Prototype.js and script.aculo.us quite a bit on any sites I’ve done lately. I remember way back when Javascript and DHTML-goodies were a dark art, and getting that drop-down menu working just right was a huge relief. Well, these two tools have been a time-saver.

As it turns out, I couldn’t get one particular drop-down menu fade-in/out to work with Prototype/Script.aculo.us … so I decided to take a look at one of the other Javascript frameworks out there: jQuery. In no time, I had things working the way I wanted.

In my previous article, Email Protection, I showed a technique for obscuring email addresses in what would appear to be regular HTML links. Combined with the Turing Protection, this has proved to be a popular and effective technique of preventing your site from being trolled for addresses.

However, it means that anyone can use your site to protect their own email addresses, leeching your server resources and bandwidth. So, let’s fix that.

Just a very quick article to compile some information I gleaned from various sites on setting up name-based virtual webhosting on your local OS X box.

I’m digging up some of my old code snippets from various places and putting them here for posterity (and possible use by you, the viewer).

Here’s one that takes a simple XML file and converts it into an array. In this case, “simple” means “no attributes”. It may barf on other XML files too, so I make no guarantees.

My article about Turing Protection generated lots of comments about how using image CAPTCHAs restricts access to the visually impaired.

So, I’ve played around a bit, and added an audio component. If you can’t read the CAPTCHA image, you can listen to a .WAV file of our lovely server, spelling out the characters to you.

Here’s another bit of code to help protect your site from email harvesters and other robots that troll through the HTML source of your site looking for <a href=“mailto:...”> tags.

Most current email obfuscation works by disguising the email address, i.e. everything after the mailto: part of the link, in order to hide the @-sign.