Tudor Folk Club
Chesham, Bucks, England

Technical stuff

Spam

Eventually, I've had it up to here with spam. I've set filters to remove the most obvious words and the more persistent offenders which have been getting rid of up to twenty messages per day (including for a few days messages including "cum". Unfortunately, the messages about a gig in "Cumbria" succumbed to that filter. Oops!) But I was still getting fifty or more - many of which were extremely offensive. I think they hoover up (spider) e-mail addresses from web-sites by looking for the "mailto" tag and a valid e-mail address. So, with great reluctance, and having considered a number of options, I have decided to:

• remove all my "mailto" tags
• introduce a spider-proof mailing form which encodes all the characters in the "mailto" tag as their ISO number equivalent which, I'm led to believe, makes them invisible to the spiders which the spammers use to collect e-mail addresses from web pages. Time will tell... because I'm using a new ID ("newid") and if I get spam addressed to that, then I'll know it hasn't worked...
• get tough on incoming messages to any of the addresses which received spam

This means that any mail addressed to "Tudor" or "hamish" will now be bounced, and only those from selected addresses or to carefully guarded addresses will pass through. Sorry if this is a pain for you, but I've put it off as long as I could, and really can't see any other practical solution.

About the site architecture

As of April 2001, I've moved the site onto css (Cascading Style Sheets). Web Monkey was invaluable in providing tutorials, and all the styles have been hand-cut from that start point. I made sure to use relative font sizes as opposed to absolute sizes to support the browser Text Size option. I've ensured that everything is retro-compatible by testing with and without the style sheet, and basing the styles on existing tags such as <p>, <dir>, <blockquote> and so on. Finally, pages have been checked using Doctor HTML and the style sheet with CSSCheck.

I've re-engineered the site on the principle of keeping things as simple as humanly possible. I get very frustrated by certain sites which insist on particular browsers of screen resolution or fancy plug-ins. Also, when it's my own 'phone bill, I like to be able to load pages quickly and go off-line asap and read the stuff at my leisure. But some sites only work when you're on-line, or are unreadable from cache memory after you've ended the session.

So, following the example of Dick Gaughan:

"What you won't find here is "kewl" stuff like animated gifs, Javascript, Flash, Frames or any of the other vanity gimmicks that just screw up your browser and waste bandwidth for everybody. And you won't need to use any particular browser or screen size, either, so if you find anything which doesn't work on your setup, please let me know."

I've also stopped using frames, because you're stuck with one title for all the different pages in a site: not very friendly when working off-line. I'm ambivalent about them (frames): I kinda like them, because you can keep certain bits in view - like the site navigation - when the body scrolls, but it's hard to keep them tidy, and the page title problem...

So, the most complicated thing I've got now is nested tables.

Another rant: I hate web site editors. They always want to triple the size of a page by putting in spurious <Font> and </Font>s all over the place, and generally messing things up by thinking they know best...

I've also got shot of the visitors' count. They're so meaningless. Some count every refresh of each page: so flick back and forth a few times and - presto! - 6 visits. And they can take ages to load.

I've recently (29th August 2001) downloaded Opera and Netscape 2 to check the pages work, and also tried them on the text-only Lynx. All the Tudor Folk Club pages worked fine... (pause for self-satisfied smugness. Although there're a couple of features on other pages which I should get around to looking at...)

So: where's the guest book, eh?

Well, I had used Toolzone's guest book, but they've gone belly-up. The CGI scripts (technical term for these web-based forms which guest book tend to use) which are supplied by claranet - the ISP for this site - are very sparse, so I think I won't bother with a guest book any more. I wasn't convinced of the value anyway... You can always send me an e-mail about anything whatsoever anyway...