Obfuscate your email address to prevent spam April 17
Obfuscate is one of those words you don’t get to use in conversation much isn’t it? Unless you work at the NSA maybe, and they probably have an even more technical term.
Basically, it means “to deliberately make something unclear or difficult to understand” which actually comes in handy when you want to prevent people scraping your site to get your email address.
To try it, just enter the HTML that you want encoded into the top box. Eg:
<a href='mailto:gath@hishouse.com'>Contact Me</a>
Press the ‘Encrypt’ button and then you are given the obfuscated version. Just copy & paste the javascript into your HTML page.
Of course, you hide all kinds of things from prying eyes (automated or not). This kind of encoding can be defeated by a commited hacker (esp. the extremely simple encoding used here) but is usually enough to make the hacker look elsewhere. Using just the method above has managed to keep 95% of my sites spam free.
Right, now I’m off to play Desktop Tower Defence