Just a quick post on anyone who is trying to learn asp.net at the moment.

the asp.net website offers video tutorials on how to implement a website using the asp.net framework. As you know at the moment I am learning asp.net to help me progress further in my career. I hope this helps anyone who is trying to learn the framework using either visualbasic.net or c#.

Although version 4.0 is out now there are new and improved way of doing things, even though some videos are quite old it will give you a better understanding on how it works.

What is email scraping?

Everyone knows that websites tend to display contact details, whether it is on a contact page or displayed at the top of the screen in a header.
These contact details normally contain an email address highlighted as a link. A custom made script, maybe a spider would crawl these sites and gather emails to sell to people at a price. Thus making money from your details.

Ways of prevention

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Don’t you just hate it it when your website has a contact form and all you receive is email after email of advertising, porn web links and Viagra? Well I do anyway. While there are ways for your email client to filter the spam, there are ways to help dramatically reduce the spam sent through your contact form.

The problem

The problem is that automated scripts / users fill out forms advertising information which is considered garbage. While to us we do not take any notice but for them a link helps improve their site in search results or make money and even some cases spread viruses. It is a major problem that is not going away anytime soon.

The solution

The standard solution
Server side validation using a regular expression or validation routine checks for valid emails and to apply strict rules in the inquiry area. For example not allowing emails, web addresses. This depends on what information you are gathering from the form. This can be programmed in such languages such as ASP and PHP. This is basic practice but in conjunction with other methods this can be improved.

The client side
Probably the poorest form of validation is client side. This is mainly for the user using the form. Based on JavaScript this can easy be turned off by the user and automated scripts can easy bypass this method. This should be used in conjunction with server side validation and never use this on its own.

Advanced spam checks

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Why SEO?

One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service /  product.

So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.

It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.
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