Big Resources Ezine http://www.bigresources.com Issue 3 Volume 3, Mar 29, 2001

EZINE KICKSTART

Welcome back to the Bigresources Ezine! After being MIA for 24 days we have returned with some giant news, which will hopefully explain our longer than usual gap between mailings.

If you’ve visited a site that is a part of the Bigresources.com Network in the past, you have probably noticed some changes. We are proud to unveil our new site design across the network, which is a result of our partnership with Office.com, the top-ranked online business center. Our relationship with Office.com enables us to build and strengthen our brand while providing us with a new audience for our web developer resources. In turn Office.com offers you deep, relevant news and information on nearly 150 industries as well as access to tools and resources businesspeople like yourselves need most. We encourage you to check out Office.com today. 

Does that mean Bigresources is under new management? 

In short, no. Bigresources is still owned and managed by the good folks at Big Resources, Inc. We still produce all the content that you love, and still run the Big Resources Ezine. The role of Office.com was created to mutually extend the reach and brand of all involved. It can be considered as a tight knit “partnership”. 

Jason M. DesRoches
Big Resources Ezine editor in chief
editor@bigresources.com

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WHAT DO YOU THINK?

In the last ezine to reach your inboxes, I asked you guys to send in feedback about our Weekly Feature which was titled "Micro-Charging for Your Content" (which can still be found here). I asked if you thought that charging your visitors a small membership fee could help to supplement falling CPM advertising, and here's what you had to say:

David Swift of http://www.acommunity.co.uk writes:

Hi Jason,

For ages now people have got used to using the internet for getting free content. Webmasters have been able to provide this content thanks to the money the got from banner advertising. But, as you said, there has been a huge fall in the banner market, (as I know well having recently paid quite a bit of money for wasted advertising.) 
So I see no problem in charging a small price for good quality content, but most internet surfers might, after all the years of getting things for free. So, while micro charging for content may enable you to keep a site going, but it may loose you lots of traffic.

Just my $00.2,
Dave.

Jerry Norsworthy of http://penguin-colony.com adds:

I don't think many will be willing to pay for content unless:

1. It's material not available (for free) anywhere else (including.....gasp......local printed media). 
2. Every content provider on the Internet simultaneously starts charging for content. 
3. Surfers start feeling a lot more secure about the security of their credit card numbers being whisked away to the farthest reaches of the 'Net.

Great feedback guys. I think that "visitor loyalty" also plays a large role into the decisions of your audience. Fans of larger sites that have been around a while, whom frequent often, may be willing to dig into their pockets. Newer sites that are just building their audiences may not have much luck.

This week, I'd like to ask everybody about a specific advertising issue, the skyscraper (tower) ad. Still a somewhat "untraditional" form of advertising, it is beginning to catch on more and more. Standing 400 pixels high and 125 pixels wide, it covers a total of 50,000 square pixels, nearly double that of a 468x60 which covers a total of 28,080 square pixels. Additionally, the skyscraper ad is placed along side of a webpage, so it is usually still viewable while a user is looking at content. With all of these advantages over traditional banner ads, do you think that it has the ability to catch a visitors attention, and reach greater click rates? If so can it help to reverse the downward CPM trend which has been ever present throughout the past year? Tell me, What do you think?

To reply to "WHAT DO YOU THINK", write to: editor@bigresources.com.

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BIGRESOURCES.COM UPDATES
Have you seen the latest updates on our network sites? 

A1JavaScripts.com (http://www.a1javascripts.com)
In addition to implementing the same facelift given to the rest of the network sites, Ian McDonald has managed to squeeze in a new script release this week, and add the first "how to" tutorial of the site.

Time of Day Status Bar JavaScript
by Blake Birkenfeld
This status bar script displays several different messages depending upon the time of day. 

Layer Hiding and Showing Tutorial
by Mark Wray
This lesson in DHTML shows how to hide or show layers of your choosing on visitor input. Specifically, It shows how to display all layers contained in your page at once, or only one at a time.

123Webmaster.com (http://www.123webmaster.com)
123webmaster is the largest directory of free webmaster resources on the planet. This week, it got better.

Prevent Email Harvesting
by Jason M. DesRoches
Learn how spiders collect your email address, and how to prevent their harvesting. 

FresherImage.com (http://www.fresherimage.com)
This week's ezine graces us with two updates at our friendly neighborhood clipart depot and design resource.

Macromedia Flash Tutorial: Learn to make UFO Rings
by Lars Østergaard 
You have probably seen those popular rings around a logo countless times on the web, and its actually pretty easy to do with Fireworks. Learn how it's done.

Photoshop Tutorial: Making Screws
by Mike DeFelece
Learn to make realistic screw heads.

FreeWebTemplates.com (http://www.freewebtemplates.com)
FreeWebTemplates' loyal audience of graphics enthusiasts have submitted another 60 new user templates! Ranging from business, to table, to fun themed templates, this update is not to be missed!

FontFiles.com (http://www.fontfiles.com)
If you have an interest in typography, then you'll love the latest 25 fonts added to FontFiles.com. Among the points of interest in this update are: Athletic (for you sports fans), Bird Silhouettes (which should appease both animal lovers, and wingding fans), BeeBop (for all of you free spirits), and Barcode (I know one of you will find a great purpose for this one!). You can also view the rest of our latest fonts here:
http://www.fontfiles.com/Fonts/New/15-Mar-2001.html

HTMLforums.com (http://www.htmlforums.com)
Upgrade to Vbulletin 2!
To help us kick off our network relaunch, we've upgraded our community forums to the latest version of vBulletin. With the upgrade comes a slew of new features and widgets. Members of our webmaster community are now able to create polls, private message each other, put avatars (small 50x50 pictures) under their names and titles, and check their posts with a much needed spell checker! If you haven't visited our forums for a while (or if you've never been there), you're not only missing out on free help for all of your developing, promotional, and profiting needs, but you're also missing the opinions of your fellow developers. Stop by, and get in tune with the pulse of the web!

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LAST HEARD IN THE COMMUNITY
It can be said that this section goes hand in hand with the one above. Taken from our community forums, at http://www.htmlforums.com, are some of the more interesting conversations that are taking place right now.

Free Domains: The End of
Pulled from the "Website Tools and Services" category of HTMLforums, our good friend David Swift (who just also happens to have written into our "What do You Think" column this week), comments on the death of the short lived "free domain" craze which swept quickly through the net. What's your opinion on the end of this trend?

New Cross-browser Liquidized Layers
Will DIV tags ever replace tables? According to Marlboro (Mark Wray, who incidentally submitted the new DHTML tutorial to A1JavaScripts that is featured in the Bigresources.com Updates section of this ezine) seems to think so. A nice example of this method is presented, and then torn down by other members of the forum. If you have strong feelings about DHTML -or- backwards compatibility, this is the thread for you.

Would you ever participate in a forum poll?
Even the most serious developer needs to take a break. This poll (started by yours truly) takes advantage of the new polling system built into our forum script upgrade. Would you ever participate in a poll given at a web forum?

Not looking to join a lengthy discussion at the moment with our active community of webmasters? Well, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you (although it might), but you might just want to stop by and get a free review of your website anyway. Our community is always happy to help.

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WEEKLY FEATURE
Prevent Email Harvesting 
by Jason M. DesRoches

Unsolicited email (Spam), we all get it, and we all hate it. Where does it come from? How do these people find us? Well, if you are a webmaster (which you most likely are if you are reading this) it could be that your contact page, or any place on your website that contained your email address, was spidered by a malicious bot, with intentions of harvesting, using, and selling your email address to countless clients. 

At this point you may be thinking "spidering bots? Malicious harvesting? Are you making this up? This sounds like it’s straight out of the Matrix." Well, while I did enjoy the flick, there is no movie magic behind these malicious bots. There are programs that exist only to capture the email address from your page. Once your address has been captured, it is stored in a database, and then distributed in a market that caters to this type of business all throughout the world. Pretty soon you begin to receive advertisements for little blue miracle pills, cable de-scrambling instructions, so-called "free" pagers, and even investment opportunities for bogus stocks. And what’s worse, you don’t just get one copy of the email, but several, and to all of the email addresses that were posted on your contact page. Well, at least there is a way to Opt-Out of this nonsense, you say to yourself as you click the "unsubscribe link", but what’s this? The unsubscribe link doesn’t work, and in the off chance that it does work, it is not an unsubscribe link at all, but just a method of checking if the email was sent to a "live address". 

Curse you! You shout in frustration, and reply to the email with all sorts of nasty words, only to receive a bounce moments later. “Curse you all! I know what to do”, you think to yourself, “I’ll just block the sender, and then no more junk from these people can get through”. A fine idea, fine indeed, unfortunately the sender will more than likely never use the same email address more than once if it is indeed bon-e-fide Spam. So what else can you do to nail these jerks? Well, you can always use a free reporting service such as http://www.spamcop.net to send an email to the host or ISP of the sender, and kindly inform them that they have a user that is committing a TOS violation, and a crime with penalties ranging from a per user fine, to felony prison time. This will surely evoke a response, and pretty soon… congratulations, you’ve successfully gotten the attention of the low life’s ISP, and his account has been terminated. Unfortunately though, the fiend has a copy of his harvested email list stored elsewhere on the Internet, and did not plan on using the same host to send his next mailing. Drat! 

So what can you do? How can you stop the nonsense of ever growing harvesting and increasing daily Spam to your business account? Well, as in medicine, the best cure is prevention, and to prevent this atrocity, you must first understand what is happening, and how these spider-bots work. When one of these spiders reaches your page, it searches through your source code for something that looks like an email address, such as your@email.com, or possibly for the content inside of a “mailto” tag. As soon as it finds this information, it grabs it, and stores it for keeps. 

Ah-Ha! So that’s how they do it! And it can be fought without any disruption to your visitors that wish to send you legitimate email by applying a simple JavaScript. Please pay close attention to the script posted below: 

<script language="Javascript"> 
<!-- 
//this simple script by a1javascripts.com 
//please leave credit and instructions intact 
//simply enter your emailname and emailserver below 
//and copy and paste to entire script where you want it to show. 
emailname = "webmaster" 
emailserver = "your-domain.com" 
//change the font face, color and size below 
document.write("<font face='Arial,Helvetica' size=-1>"); 
document.write("<a href='mailto:" + emailname + "@" + emailserver + "'>"); 
document.write("<font color='ff0000'>"); 
document.write(emailname + "@" + emailserver); 
document.write("</a>"); 
document.write("</font>"); 
//--> 
</script> 

When this script is correctly inserted in place of your standard email link, it will ward off even the cleverest of spider-bots, and prevent the harvesting of your email address, thus saving you from dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unsolicited emails. So what should you do about the Spammers that already have your email address stored? Well, first off it might not all be Spam. It is more than likely that you could have inadvertently subscribed for many mailings without even realizing it, in which case, the unsubscribe link will work successfully. However, for the rest of mailings that are truly Spam, it’s always worth a shot to try out some of the methods for blocking addresses, and reporting Spammers discussed earlier in this article. I also suggest checking out http://www.spamcop.com (not to be confused with the reporting service at spamcop.net) for other ideas on keeping your inbox clear of clutter. 
 

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WHY SUBMIT?
Why should you submit original content for us to publish? Check out what Corbbmacc O'Connor from http://www.justforwebmasters.com had to say about it, after submitting an article to us for publishment: 

"You recently featured my article in The BIG Resources Newsletter. The article was called How to Build a Database-Driven Site Using SSI. I would like to thank you very much for doing this. I have received subscribers to my newsletter and have received a lot of hits to my web site. Thanks again!" 

Get in on the great exposure we offer, submit your work to us! We're looking for original articles, tutorials, and product review submissions to be featured in both our Ezine, and on http://www.123webmaster.com. If you feel that you are a talented web writer, and are knowledgeable with website promotion, webmaster tools, graphic design, webmaster tips, or web scripting (any language) then please send your article submissions to editor@bigresources.com. 

All approved articles will be published with full credit to their author (including a link, email address, and any other information that you would like included), and will be read by over 65,000 webmasters. Submit today, and get published! 

We are now also looking for graphic tip submissions for FresherImage.com, read the criteria for graphic tip submission here: http://fresherimage.com/Tips/Submit/.

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Questions about this issue? contact the editor at: editor@bigresources.com

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