You are likely to be here for one of several reasons:
- you clicked my e-mail link and came here instead
- you are lost
- you were curious and somehow managed to find this page
- this page was indexed on Google or Yahoo for some weird reason
You came here when you clicked my e-mail link
If this happened, you most likely don't have javascript enabled on your computer. I used a javascript to foil spambots from harvesting my e-mail address. If you want to e-mail me, you can type the address, lgpiper@MetastableStates.com, into your e-mail program. Alternatively, you can use my contact page. It doesn't rely on javascript to work.
You are lost
If you got here by mistake, all I can do is say I'm sorry. The links at the bottom will take you to several of the other pages on this site. You may or may not find anything of interest.
You were curious
I decided I didn't want to make it easy for spammers to find my e-mail address, so I removed it from my web pages. This is not a good idea per se. I believe that people who publish web pages should make themselves available for comments, praise, or abuse.
So my first solution was to make up a nifty graphic image of my e-mail address. I could have made the image clickable, but then I would have had to put my e-mail address in the underlying html or make up a javascript. Putting it in the underlying html wouldn't have protected me from spammers. At the time I didn't know the first thing about java scripting.
Once I learned some javascripting, I figured out a way to make the page look exactly like it would have had I just put in a standard html mailto
link. But, when the spambots read my page, all they will read is mail me
. The words mail and me are variables in the javascript. For the curious, the exact script is
<a href="./Oops.html" onclick="parent.location=mail+me; return false;" class="bottomnav" title="e-mail to lgpiper[_AT_]MetastableStates [_DOT_]com"> lgpiper@MetastableStates.com </a>
where, the variable mail is the string mailto:
and the variable me is my e-mail address. The variables are defined in an external script file (identified in my pages' headers) and are the concatenation of several subvariables comprising the various parts of my e-mail address.
At one time I used a javascript to display the e-mail address one would see. However, if javascripting were turned off, no one would see the e-mail address. So I have replaced some of the letters in the e-mail address by the numerical character references appropriate to each of the missing letters. Spambots harvest raw text, so won't get the actual letters, just the set of characters p for p, y for y, etc.
If JavaScripting has been turned off, the person who clicks the mailto link comes to this page. If the scripting is on, the return false message keeps the link from bringing you to this page.
If you want to borrow this script, please feel free to do so. Only please change the numerical character references in the script with ones appropriate for your own e-mail address.
Googlebot made you do it
If you got here from a search, I hope you found what you wanted. Most likely, you wanted to know how to foil spam bots from harvesting your e-mail address. I hope my explanation was helpful.