This site was set up using Adobe GoLive, and the graphics were developed using Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady. Our objective has been to provide members of the Colorado JCI Senate with a useful resource, as well as with a web site we can be proud of.
Our thanks to Brad Weis for allowing us to use one of his photographs for the backdrop on our pages. Brad has an incredible web site, which we encourage you to visit . We also thank Logonisp.com for providing us with the domain name, cojcisenate.org, for free.
This site was first posted for comment on December 15, 2001, and various of our board members made suggestions which were implemented. We quickly corrected a coding error that was showing up on Windows browsers, but which this Mac-a-holic didn't notice. If you see other things wrong with this site, or would simply like to see something added, please email the webmaster.
By mid-February, we had set up the mySQL databases and PHP scripts that drive the "Find a Senator" and "Contact Us" pages on the main part of the web site.
The site allowing people to register online for U.S. JCI Senate Fall Board Meeting went active in May, 2002, and was taken down following the meeting. Several members of the committee had access to the registration database via a web page, which helped to us to spread the load significantly.
On October 31, 2002, we added a page for our newsletter archive.
During mid-February, 2003, we redesigned the site so it would download faster. The roll-over graphics used for the side-bar menu were replaced with some simple CSS commands, like so:
#menuHome { color: #006400; font-weight: bold; font-size: 13px; font-family: "Arial Black"; position: absolute;
top: 13px; left: 1px; width: 100px; height: 382px; visibility: visible; display: block }
#menuHome a { color: #006400; font-weight: bold; font-size: 13px; font-family: "Arial Black"; text-decoration: none }
#menuHome a:hover { color: black }
Holy Moly Andy (or Holy Moly Andy)
On April 1, 2003, I decided to fool the "spambots" and make it more difficult for them to vacuum email addresses from the pages of this web site. Go to the Email Obfuscator and you will see this:
Out there on the World Wide Web, there are nasty little programs known as "spambots". All these little spider programs do is crawl around the web, searching for email addresses embedded in web pages. When they find them, they collect them and they are sold or otherwise circulated to unscrupulous people who want to send "spam", or unsolicited commercial email, some of which is pretty offensive.
Since I had been receiving emails addressed to webmaster at cojcisenate dot org, which had obviously been vacuumed off a website I designed myself, I decided to put the Email Obfuscator to work. I figured "it's free, so what the heck". All it does is transform linked email addresses into HTML ampersand character escapes, and you just copy and paste those lines of gibberish into the appropriate places on your web page.
From the beginning of time, web browsers have figured it's their job to take an HTML ampersand character escape like H and convert it into human-readable form -- "H". But the vast majority of spambots aren't that smart, so they merrily skip over the gibberish and keep going.
The use of frames on our site is purposeful, although it does cause problems with some of the search engines. This isn't a commercial site, so I'm not concerned about that. Someday, I may go to the effort of setting up a robots.txt file and then really messing with any 'bad robot' that doesn't access it.
Doing some further research, I ran across an article entitled "How do spammers capture email addresses?". I suggest you go take a look. Way down at the bottom of that article are two foms you can use to disguise your email links. I liked them so much that, once I have permission, I'll post a page here with just those forms.
Make 'em disappear
After reading all that stuff about email obfuscation, I noticed one thing in common with all the articles: if you don't want your email addresses to be harvested, don't put them on your HTML pages at all. So I spent about a week putting together a PHP page that does some neat stuff with the databases to obtain the intended recipient's email address, and provides a form for the sender to fill out - sender's name, email address, message, phone number (optional), and a Send button. It also does some error checking to make sure the sender fills in all the necessary information. (After some proding from some of our site users, I even removed the display of a receipient's email address from the page displayed by sendmail.php, even though it's highly unlikely that a spambot could parse a server-generated page like that.)
So as of May 2nd, 2003, when someone clicks on an email link on any page of this site, they get that little form, but no email link.
New Web Host
In March, 2004 we moved the hosting for this site to a server maintained by GetNewHosting.com. Although our previous web host, CubeSoft, provided excellent service, at a reasonable cost, GetNewHosting.com provides a lot more goodies, and we can actually call them on the phone when we need help.
