Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

We’ve been having beautiful fall weather here in Winnipeg for the last few weeks. Temperatures about 10 deg C (50 deg F).

I was out yesterday at lunch for a walk and I passed by the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, a $260 million world-class museum that is currently in its initial stages of construction in Winnipeg. I took a picture:

It reminded me of Behold, now in alpha soon moving to beta.

Then I came to the display that said what was to come:

This reminded me of Behold version 2.0.

The race is on. Who will be first?

The export to HTML and RTF now works producing at least as good output as it did in the last release.

So those were the 6 major things I needed to implement for the beta. All done. I started them on October 14th, so they took just over a month.

Now there’s just 6 small things left:

1. Change the expiry date method to now use a 45 day trial from the date the key was downloaded.
2. Add a “New Version Available” link in the menu bar, to make it clear when a new beta is available.
3. Include an “Exception capturing ability” so that any bugs won’t cause Behold to crash, but will allow reporting of the bug encountered.
4. Recalibrate the progress bar now that I’ve re-twigged everything.
5. Change where files are installed to be the correct places on Vista and Windows 7.
6. Change the Behold web pages to announce the beta and build the new version and put it up.

“Obfuscate”. I love that word. It sounds like you’re swearing when you say it.

The exporting has been going pretty well. Then I saw that the last alpha did not make URL’s or e-mail addresses work when exported to HTML for the web. So it wasn’t too hard to program those in.

What immediately became apparent to me is that if Behold’s HTML is then put up on the web, the email addresses are ready for harvesting by spam bots. Not nice, and not a thing that I’d like Behold to be responsible for.

Currently on all my web sites, I show my email address and allow a click on it to bring up your mail program seeded with my address. Try it with the email link at the bottom of this page.

Secretly, I use the javascript language to obfuscate (or hide) my actual email address from those automated spam harvesters, none of which know javascript. You can’t tell, because the email shown and passed to your email program looks fine. That’s because your browser processes the javascript for you. But those bots are not browsers and don’t get it. I have posted my email address on the web for years this way, and I get fewer than 10 spam a day compared to about 50 good emails. And I’ve used MailWasher (a great program) for longer than I can remember to check through my spam .

Unfortunately, the way Richview develops its email links, I can’t incorporate the Javascript code into Behold’s output. Instead I used a combination of URL character encoding and Hex encoding, which isn’t perfect, but should stop 95% of the spam bots.

So if you are a person that will be exporting Behold’s html output to put it on the web, I’m trying to be responsible to protect you as best as I can.