New title – Convergence

My boss made a timely comment: “I suggest you keep writing good articles for a specific audience.” I will do that — here the focus will be on communications and computers, the convergence between technology and the way we connect with one another, now and in the future.

To make that more obvious, I changed the title of the entire blog to Convergence. Wikipedia defines convergence as “In the absence of a more specific context, convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state.”

I see this blog AS the context, as the definite point, whether time passes or not (and it always does). I would hope that my approaches, values, opinions, could spark threads of discussion that lead to a common view, a fixed point where we share equilibrium. At least for now.

I’ve had people tell me they think my website (http://www.heavenr.com) is too unfocused — or actually, focused on too many topics. I want to avoid that here, so everything I post will be aimed at convergence … or one of the previously-stated converging interests. Thus it falls into the mathematical definition of convergence: “to claim the existence of a limit.”

Since this blog purports to be about computers, the computer definition of convergence is “a means of modelling [sic] the tendency for genetic characteristics of populations to stabilize over time.” At least that’s what Wikipedia says about evolutionary computing — and that’s exactly what I want this to be about. Not stability, per se, but about the tendency for characteristics to stabilize, or converge. Or evolve.

And Wikipedia (gotta love it) says convergence in a social or language sense is “the blending of two languages that are perceived as having equal social status” — in this case the languages of communications and computing. As far as I’m concerned, they are certainly equal; I can’t do one without the other.

By the way, I include in the term communications both mass and personal. Mass because I want the message to have a long … perhaps limitless … reach to all parts of the Internet and the globe, and personal because at the point where and when my fingers touch the keyboard, it’s just me talking to myself. If this works, if someone (you maybe?) reads and listens, and maybe responds, I’ll call it a success. On the other hand, if I simply succeed in relieving myself of things I want to say (or my socially-acceptable demons), I’ll be happy. I’ve banged my gong, tooted my horn, put on my funny hat, and called attention to myself as well as I know how.

My former boss (Life is Beautiful) also said “I am not aware of any quick and easy way to get attention … It took two years for me to get 5,000-10,000 pageviews/day. The average pageview/day in the first year was less than 1,000.” Pageviews, another convergence term (generally assuming one page equals one reader, except at my house where people point at the screen and say with excitement “hey, look at this”). Man, this blogging thing is rich, fertile ground.

Major accomplishment

Well, not really. In the Grand Scheme, it rates barely a hiccough — especially to seasoned programmers. Still, I experimented a little the other night and stretched my technical skills and vocabulary.

The premise is that I refuse to post email addresses in plain text to websites I manage. It’s just too easy to program a robot that sequentially looks at every page of every IP address for “name at domain dot top_level_domain” using the @ and dot (.) characters for reference. I’ve seen the result of unethical and sometimes unlawful use of email addresses harvested by the spiders of spammers.

So with the help of Chris Hill at IABC’S international headquarters in San Francisco (http://www.iabc.com/), I started using a script routine to embed the email address in JavaScript, where the spiders can’t find it. It literally doesn’t exist until the browser (client) executes the script on your computer. I use this script for every occurence on my own website (http://www.heavenr.com/) and every other website within my control.

The script is quite simple. It creates two variables (a_mail_name and a_mail_domain) into which you place the portions of a legitimate email address on either side of the @ sign. Then it uses document.write() statements to parse together the variables and the rest of a standard mailto: link. I’ve created them with CC variables, BCC variables, subject variables, and body text variables. I suppose I could also break the heavenr.com portion into two separate variables but I never saw a need. At its most basic, it looks like this:

<script language=”Javascript”>
a_mail_name = “heavener”
a_mail_domain = “heavenr.com”
document.write(“<a href=’mailto:” + a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain + “‘>”);
document.write(“<span class=’H6′>”);
document.write(a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain);
document.write(“</span>”);
document.write(“</a>”);
</script>

(Note that this blog’s software forces me to use the character replacements & l t ; and & g t ; in place of the less-than and greater-than symbols (left and right angle brackets) when I’m in edit mode. The strange thing is that when this article is in view mode, the replacements get converted back the way the script uses them — I guess YMMV applies here. If you copy the script, be sure to use the proper angle bracket characters.) You can also open up pages (view source) at my websites and copy the script.

A while back, I was redoing the website for my church ( BTW, for some reason it was changed to a web hosting company that undid all the hard-learned lessons about nonprofit web sites). I added a page for a new fundraising program (scrip.htm), so our congregation’s members can download the order forms anytime. For variety, I took a screen shot of one slide from the PowerPoint presentation and dropped it into the web page as a graphic. That slide has an email address, so I thought I should create an image map hotspot so the congregation could send messages, as the presentation intended.

But I stumped myself — image hotspots have a structured syntax that’s bigger than just an anchor tag. How in the world could I justify making the hotspot a readily harvestable plain text email address? It violated my sense of ethics and mocked the standard I’ve set for myself. The hotspot code defied my JavaScript. And there were no tips or comments out there on the worldwide web.

The only answer, obviously, was to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to modify the image map and/or the script so they work together. After some nosing around in the code, I finally found the ticket — embed the map’s anchor/coordinates statement inside the document.write() statements, like this:

<img src=”scrip.jpg” mce_src=”scrip.jpg” width=”326″ height=”244″ alt=”" border=”0″ hspace=15 usemap=”#scrip”>
<map name=”scrip”><map name=”scrip”>
<script language=”Javascript”>
a_mail_name = “heavener”
a_mail_domain = “heavenr.com”
document.write(“<area alt=’Email questions to us’ + “);
document.write(” coords=’37,146,201,166′ + “);
document.write(“href=’mailto:” + a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain + “‘>”);
</script>
</map>

It wasn’t all that hard, really, but it made me feel happy that I could do it alone … without help. Justice lives on and the email address is only harvestable if a human touches the link. Take that, accursed spambots!

Ideas galore .. take what you need

As a professional communicator and trainer, I’m always interested in sharing my ideas with others. I’ve learned that no good idea ever goes completely obsolete. Sometimes new eyes can see new purposes to apply to “old” information.

That’s why my website (Communications Integrator) is a repository for relevant information about building successful consistent, integrated communications – things that have made money for other companies or improved the way they do business.

Feel free to use anything you find. If it works for you, I’d like to applaud your good fortune, so let me know what you  did and where I can look.