When I click on a “contact” link, I rather be taken to a page where I can click a link to email somebody rather than filling a contact form. I guess either I’m too lazy or I prefer using my email client.

If you’ve published your email address on your website, you know it can be caught by automated scripts that crawl the web to find potential mailboxes to spam.

So how can you publish your email while hidding it from spammers? The answer is easy: simply use some Javascript to break your email address into multiple lines of code so it won’t be caught by those malicious scripts.

Here’s an example:

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”>
document.write(’<a href=”mailto:johndoe’);
document.write(’@nowhere.com”>Send me an email</a>’);
</script>

Inserting this code in your web page would display an email link that is invisible to search engines since they do not support client-side scripting.

For those who didn’t know, the OpenAds project has now changed name for OpenX. The developers have decided to rebrand the product in order to gain more flexibility.

I was a bit unconfortable to upgrade to OpenX as a name change gives you the impression it might be a total different application but in fact, it’s simply OpenAds 2.4.4. So since I’ve got OpenAds 2.4.3 installed, it should be no problem.

I always keep a good backup of my websites so restoring OpenAds to its previous version is going to be quick if I need to do it. By the way, I always have my servers upload a daily, weekly and monthly backup to my workstation so that I always have a backup handy.

For those who use a phpAdsNew or older OpenAds version than 2.4.3, please read OpenX documentation.

Basically, the upgrade process is pretty straightforward:

1. Grab yourself a copy of OpenX.
2. Extract the files from the archive and upload them to your web server, overwriting the previous installation.
3. Point your browser to the root of your OpenX installation directory.
4. Go through the setup wizard. You may have some folder permissions to set.

That’s pretty much it. I didn’t need to update the invocation code in my web pages.

By the way, if you haven’t upgraded to PHP5 yet, it’s time you start thinking about it. OpenX has a discussion about supporting PHP5 exclusively. Read more about it here.

Adding a local search engine to your website not only serves your visitors: it will provide you with a tremendous amount of precious data. You will learn about what your visitors are looking for, how do they search for it, the most popular searches, etc. You can then put this data to your service by optimizing your pages, writing new content, etc.

I used to use phpDig a lot but since it hasn’t been updated since 2005, so I need to find an alternative. I’ve found out about Sphider, a free PHP crawler, so we’re going to try it out today.

(more…)