email me… NOT!

I hate spam. I really, really, really hate it. After having my email address as very public information almost 10 years, it got to the point where I was getting one or two legitimate email messages out of every 2,500 or so. I tried every spam filter known. They pretty much all sucked — they required constant administration and training or were too difficult for legitimate email senders to work around.

So, after much hemming and hawing, I decided to change my email address. Here it is:

psych!

There's no way I'm posting my email address here. And there's no way I'm using a form on this site to let you email me either — too easy for spammers to write web bots that abuse such things. I will tell you that I use google's gmail.com service for email exclusively now, and that my primary email address is made up mostly of elements from my real name, Mark Andrachek.

If you can figure it out from that, great. If you can't... well, maybe I'll consider posting my ICQ # or something. Email me if you want me to do that.

Oh wait.... :)

new isaac pics

If you haven't visited our photo gallery in awhile, you're missing out! Bonnie has uploaded some newer shots of Isaac to our gallery. Here's a few of my favorites:

applying styles to external links

It's nice to give users and indication of where a link might take them. For example I wanted all external links to have different color, dashed lines, and to open in new windows. Going back through all my WordPress entries to apply classes and targets to all those links didn't look like much fun. But using a bit of javascript and css, we can programatically apply a seperate class to external urls.

The first step is to get all of the link tags in the document. This can be done with the getElementsByTagName() method. Then you need to loop over them, check to see if they're extee
rnal by using the getAttribute() tag to check the href attribute's value (javascript automatically makes your url's fully qualified, so /blog will be converted to http://mysite/blog). If it's external, then use the javascript to set the className for the link to a css class that sets the look for external links. You can even change the target for external links if you want.

I'm using on this site now. You can grab the javascript, with some basic installation instructions.

long time no see

It's been awhile since I've blogged. A lot of things have happened in my life over the last 7 months. Bonnie and I had our first wedding anniversary. Isaac's crawling and has gotten his first tooth. We've bought our first house and moved into it, a 100-year-old Victorian in the small town of Crewe, VA. It's an hour SW of Richmond, and yes, I'm commuting 4 days a week.

It's been an amazing — but very busy — time in my life. I promise there will be more to come soon, both blog entries and photos.