Who doesn’t hate email spam? Those messages telling you to how to refinance your house, please your mate, or lose unwanted weight are nothing but a waste of time. Placing your email address online can increase the number of spam emails in your inbox even higher. Email spiders, programs designed to crawl the web looking for email addresses, can find your contact information online and use it to spam you. While you could not post your email online, sometimes you might need a way for people to contact you.

Many people fight the spam bots by obfuscating their emails (for example “joe [at] example [dot] com” or “joe@REMOVETHISexample.com”). This does an OK job, but it’s also a royal pain for the visitor, who has to type in, or fix your email address if they want to send you an email. The ultimate spam fighting question arises: “How do you keep bots out while letting real users in”. GMail’s plus-addressing feature and jQuery might be able to bring us one step closer to an answer.

[More]

When creating WordPress themes, one problem I’ve faced is using template tags and other functions which aren’t implemented in older versions of WordPress. Of course the best solution is for people to upgrade their version of WordPress, but you can’t exactly force people to do this. If you want to use new functions, but want to support people with older versions of WordPress, there’s something you can do. As an example, let’s look at wp_page_menu().

[More]