Keeping your email address private, i.e. never putting it up anywhere is by far the best way to avoid spam, but that’s not always possible.

One way to make it harder for spam bots to harvest your email address is by encoding it. Encoding is simply the process of changing the email into code making it harder to robots to recognize.

A new WordPress plugin was released at the end of 2011 which does just that. Once installed and activated, the email address encoder plugin turns email addresses and mailto links into decimal and hexadecimal entities thus protecting them. The plugin works on email addresses throughout your WordPress site including comments.

Here is a great video illustrating the point.

Today, I discovered Subtle Patterns, a web project by Atle Mo.  Atle is a Norwegian designer and his subtle patterns projects is both wonderful and Free. You can browse the various patterns, preview them, download the one you wish to use or download them all. How wonderful!

Whitney Hess gave a great presentation on the Principles of UX Design. In her talk she challenged the audience to read companies’ design principles and guess who they were. Some of these were then discussed and mocked a bit. Facebook claims that transparency is an important principle of theirs, yet, we’ve witnessed the opposite on many occasions. Charles and Ray Eames have a delightful list of principles and these are clearly felt in their designs. I’ve never been to Burning Man, but my friend Kathleen immediately guessed them to be behind this ambitious list of design principles.

Although the topic of WDS wasn’t Web design, similar set of discussions happened throughout the rest of the weekend. Whether you call them business principles or design principles, the principles you live by are what define you and make you who you are. On the flight back to Vancouver, I took a pen and paper and decided to make my own list. I probably should have done this 8 years ago when I started this company, but better late than never. So here is my list:

Bluelime Media Design Principles

• Do Good Work
• Code to standard and best practices
• Keep files organized and easy to understand
• Always look for better ways
• Update client work even if they don’t ask
• Find the easiest/best solution for the client
• Suggest alternate designer or developer if I can’t do the work
• Help others
• Teach
• Connect people
• Be positive

If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this comic from the Oatmeal. This is obviously an exaggerated scenario, but sooner or later, as a designer, you will be in the same situation.

So what can we do to avoid this?
One of the best way is to educate ourselves and our clients. Paddy Donnelly & Jack Osborne have gathered a great list of resources just for you. Make sure to bookmark it and then simply send your client to one of their topic pages for a quick intro on the subject. Hopefully that will provide them with the wee nudge that was needed.

I’ve been using twitter for several years now and absolutely love it. I’ve made friends, connected with like minded folks and of course kept up with all sorts of funny nonsense. I much prefer twitter over facebook. In fact I deleted most of my facebook friends and now only ever login to see what my nieces and nephew are up to.

Unlike facebook, twitter is a bit more difficult to grasp, but so much better for business, once you get it. I could have written a very long post explaining in detail how it works, but I discovered this morning, via one of my twitter followers, @ipstenu, this very detailed article on how twitter works. Written for moms, but not just for moms, Jessica explains everything you need to know about how twitter works.

Have a read and I hope that social media helps you grow your business in 2011.

Just in time for Christmas, Rafi from Graphic Fuel, has released a FREE Photoshop template for a blog design. You can read more about his design concept and download the PSD here. Based of a 960 grid, this PSD has everything you need to build your next blog design and is very well organized.

Personally I was a bit blazé about this whole Olympic event. But once it got started, I found myself caught in the whirlwind of excitement. Walking through the city, the buzz just took control of me and I became an immediate fan. We invited ourselves to a few friends place and went to a pubs to watch the events on their TVs, but we couldn’t justified doing this everyday.

To my delight and more importantly my husbands’, we discovered that we could watch most events on the Internet. CTV streamed all of the events including the medal ceremonies. Using my dual monitor set up, I was also able to follow most of the events at work.

As Mhairi wrote a few weeks ago in a post discussing Social Media and the Olympics, this year was also the first “Twitter” Olympics. Using a series of hashtags such as #van2010 and #olympics following the events became quite fun. I was also able to get and share info about the different houses and free venues using Twitter. For example on day 2 of the Olympics, I found out that the queue for the zip line was already 2 hours long an hour before being opened and posted the info on Twitter. A follower thanked me and made different plans for the day. How great is that?

Prior to giving up TV I also stopped my subscription to the newspaper. The only time I ever looked at the sport section was during the Olympics, but now I no longer had that option. Flickr of course came to the rescue. Following the appropriate tags led me to discover fantastic photographers and photography blogs.

I’m not sure that Vancouver 2010 would have been as much fun without the Internet and I didn’t miss having a TV one bit.

Social Media Marketing Training in Vancouver and Victoria

Capulet Communications are leaders when it comes to Social Media Marketing. Following a very successful workshop at UBC Continuing Education this past winter, they’ve now scheduled two new sessions. The first in Victoria will be on April 30 and Vancouver on May 28. Having heard both Julie and Darren speak on many occasions and having read their eBook Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, I highly recommend this workshop to anyone interested in learning how to use their blog, twitter, facebook, etc… and raising their visibility online.
Full details on the workshops can be found on their website.

Mental Health Camp

Following a very popular session at this year’s Northern Voice Conference panel session called Coping Digitally, a few passionate bloggers have put together a full day event. The purpose of the event is to discuss the many ways social media and blogging can help remove the stigma of mental illness. Registration for this event is free and will be held on April 25. Full details and a list of speakers can be found on their website.

THIRD TUESDAY APRIL: Tris Hussey

Next Tuesday, April 21, Republic will host this month’s Third Tuesday event. Tris Hussey, Social Media Concierge and New Media Specialist will discuss the importance of getting your message out. He will look at the different ways to get your message out and which ones work best. Third Tuesday events are also free of charge and you can sign up by becoming a member of the meet up group.