PicoTool.com

[Andy]

I have recorded every step I made to create this site to video apart from some very basic things like uploading files. The site is not complete yet but the aim is to quickly make this an authority site for simple online tools.

I plan to post more as the site evolves and the videos become available.

At the moment www.picotool.com is just another Wordpress blog.

[Andy]

In case you are wondering how I managed to secure such a short 2-word dot com domain name that many people dream of owning, I simply worked my way down the list of terms meaning small i,e, micro, nano, pico. If you are really crazy, you could go for femto but how many people heard of that ?

[Andy]

Another interesting thing I have done is go for the Web 2 approach to building a site i.e. it should not look like those sites of yesteryear.

One of the key things here for me was to get some lime green into the site colors. I did this with the logo since it's synonymous with web2.

Next I opted for an old-looking font that is like it came from a teletype machine. But at the same time I wanted scalability in the font size to help out the visually impaired and those that simply like to play around with browser settings. So I went with the ancient-looking but scaleable TTF Courier New.

So far I haven't got much content worth reading but you can get a flavour of the concepts I am working on: www.picotool.com

[Andy]

Now I have added the first tool to the site, an email obfuscate tool. Plus I have improved the visual design. There is still more work to be done but one nice thing is that this site is #1 on google for picotool which is to be expected anyway given the focus on that name.

Check out the new tool and very simplistic look of the site here: http://www.picotool.com/3#more-3

[donecweb]

What format does your obfuscate tool use to obfuscate the email address. For example does it use Hex, Dec or does it mix both? Maybe you could offer the option to your visitors.

[Andy]

What format does your obfuscate tool use to obfuscate the email address. For example does it use Hex, Dec or does it mix both? Maybe you could offer the option to your visitors.

It randomly alternates characters between hex/dec encoding and the actual character. I made some improvements since my original post so now you can optionally include the recipient's name.

I would like to make this tool the best one of it's type on the web. I have used 5 methods to represent each character in the email and apply these randomly per character, so I don't think this can be improved on for a mailto link.

[donecweb]

Say Andy you have a great tool there. One of the complaints I have had about other email obfuscaters is that they used the same code for the obfuscation every time so once a spambot got it the bot would always have it. With yours since you use a random code then just because they have the address once then you can still use the same address but a different code and the spambot will have to go to the trouble of breaking the code all over again. Also I like the added recipient feature which I haven't seen in any other email obfuscaters. My only problem is that I don't like having to be online to use a program. So I wonder what the chances are that you would make a down loadable version?

[Andy]

Thanks donecweb 

So I wonder what the chances are that you would make a down loadable version?

What put me off doing this is the problems associated with installable software e.g.

• platform
• legal issues
• size of download

In case you are thinking I may lose the advantage of traffic to my site by offering a down loadable version of a tool, I should actually get more traffic since I include a clickable link on the software itself that will open a browser window on my site. So as people give away and re-distribute my software, curious users will click the link and they will maybe download even more tools etc.

An online tool gets around the cross-platform issue.

Legal issues are the pain in the butt stuff that you should cover in the install files and in the about menu of the program.

The size of the download can be a huge drain on your hosting bandwidth allocation.

To get around the legal stuff, I simply provide anonymous software and locate myself virtually on the globe so nobody can be sure where I reside at any particular time of the year. Also I never heard of some smalltime free ware author being taken to court.

For download size I found a great solution. Code in .NET since this uses the .NET Common Language Runtime that is free to download and I think it is integral to Vista and there is a Linux port of the code called something like MONO

My first PicoTool using RealBasic produced a .exe file of some 3MB but the .NET version was only 24KB !

Download this software and try it out here: http://www.picotool.com/temp/obfuscatedotnet.zip It's just a 5KB download! Less than some banners. It's just a zipped up exe file that doesn't need installing. Let me know if you can get this working under Linux.