David Cho reminded me that my “Contact” link in the upper right of the header wasn’t working. This motivated me to see if the plug-in I used for WordPress had been updated to 2.0, and voila, I now have a working contact form!
For all of you bloggers out there, using a contact form is a much better way to have people contact you than providing your email address. Spambots are much less likely to grab your email from a contact form then they are if you just post a link, and I think the form is more convenient than writing cryptically “your email at your website dot com.”
So if you use WordPress, check this page out: http://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/
If you don’t use WordPress, I would suggest checking out formmail for either php or cgi. I’ve used both, and I prefer the php version. But they’re so similar, it doesn’t matter a whole heck of a lot. With anything that sends mail, though, check to make sure you are using the latest version so you are sure there aren’t any security breaches spammers can exploit.
And you should see if you can find a formmail which does not require the recipient to be in an input line, albeit a “hidden” one, as there’s a chance an overzealous spammer could write a script to find emails through hidden lines in the html… Unfortunately, my latter two recommendations both define the recipient in the html of the page. But… that might be an option that’s changed since the last time I used them.
Most blogging software will have a plug-in for contact forms that should do the job. If you’re using it on a regular site, look at the two options above and check out The PHP Resource Index: Complete Scripts for more form processing scripts.
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