The commemoration of Holy week was one of those times when I felt like being part of the minority. I don't belong to an organised religion and sometimes the consequences of making that choice are quite discomforting. I've learned that since I was a kid, there'd be a time of the year when there'd be no cartoons on TV, for a week! That's quite traumatic for a kid you know.

Last week, I received an email from a colleague in Johannesburg inviting me to attend the World Assembly in Glasgow. I was asked to book my ticket and by Friday send back the costs that I'll incur for that trip. Knowing that the entire nation would temporarily hibernate for the rest of the week, I frantically called travel agencies trying to book my ticket. Communication with people during these times would be futile since their minds are already in vacation mode. I received erratic quotes (there was one where my name is Cristianne) though not entirely their fault. I think I did panic too. Thursday night, I was on the verge of crying, and yet again I was saved by Technology. Yes, that god-less, amoral creation of man. To cut it short, I was able to book a ticket with emirates.com and sent back the claims form that same night, within a few minutes, without the hassles of misspelt names and incorrect dates.

I still have loads of things to do and at one point wondered if Glasgow is worth all these sh*t. I have to cancel my attendance in a summer course on globalisation and civ soc, get bank statements, letters, and undergo the whole rigmarole of applying for a visa, where you're life would depend on a single individual with biases and prejudices deciding whether to give you that much-coveted stamp or deny you entrance to their blessed country. And yet, it's different the other way around, when 'they' apply for a visa to go to Asia, it's almost served in a silver platter. What's more pissing is the waiting time. I have to get my passport back before May 10 because of our trip to Malaysia.

Last night, I stopped thinking about these for a while and enjoyed glasses-ful of vodka, cherry and sprite, and I thought, this is how life should be; chilled, uncomplicated, worry-free. But no, because most of the time someone eventually gets drunk, makes a mess of himself, and you have no choice but to see the bastard home.

I never consider myself one, but today I have a feeling that it's quite apt to describe the intensity of my concentration in finding an easy and secure way to prevent the website that I'm tinkering from spam.

I've been a victim of comment spam too. All of a sudden I got a message from Rodrigo or Sara inviting me to try Viagra. Usually the reason for spam is to create links to increase page rank of that site. I didn't give a damn then but now that I knew better, I decided to make life more difficult for "email harvesters" or engine bots.

As everybody from Earth knows, Google is a very nifty tool to find everything you need (except for missing car keys, but eventually Google will get into that). I want two links protected: first, the mailto: link. The usual format uses the a href code, so when you click riskinnet, you're mailer (i.e, Outlook) will pop up and you can start sending email to the mailto: address. Second, is a web content form. I have created a from where non-malicious people who have legit queries or comments can directly type away their woes and when they click the submit button, it will directly send to the specified email address.

So I started with Google using keywords such as web content anti spam, mailto: prevent spam, etc and got more than 100 million results. I found several websites giving advice to newbies like me.

I decided to try two easy suggestions from those very helpful sites. First strategy is the use of a graphic @. You have to create an @ in Photoshop or in any image editing tool , save it in your server, and insert the image url in your address, like this one: riskinnet < img src = "/ images / @.gif" align = absbottom border = 0 alt= @ > riskinnet.com. The downside is that your email add won't be clickable, instead visitors need to type in your email address manually. The second defense is the use of ASCII characters in your email address. Letters and symbols in the email address would be converted to ASCII and then hopefully, the user's browser would convert those characters back to readable letters, but it won't be easy for spammers using automatic web crawlers. Related to this, I found a site which encodes your regular email address into a series of numbers and symbols plus the mailto: link and all you have to do is copy and paste in your a href code.

I still have to find among those 100 million results something that would help me protect the web form I created. I actually found one which uses CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It has a web verification image for the user to type first before the form gets submitted. But my problem is I need to create an output page with meta html redirect in my form processing script. It's doable for a newbie but I'm quite exhausted at the moment.

If you want to put a stop on spam, you might want to visit these websites:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/stop-comment-spam
http://www.ohlone.cc.ca.us/org/webcenter/emailencoder.html
http://www.protectwebform.com/.

Good luck ;)