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When a recent visitor to this blog inquired how to contact me via email, it was a wake up call to provide some means to provide this most basic means of communication. Actually, it’s been something I’ve wanted to address for a while now, but to be honest, the only thing I could think of is to search out a WordPress plugin or widget that might provide a contact form.

Needless to say, that search hasn’t progressed very far at all.

So, in the interim, a quick and dirty solution was needed quickly. Of course, I didn’t want to just put it on the “About” page in plain text, even the old forum trick of “name@(nospam)domain.com” or whatever, didn’t look too appealing to me. I suppose I could always code up a php contact form and paste it into my “About” page, but I’m not up for that right this moment.

So what could I do that’s in between a full-on HTML contact form and a cheesy “NOSPAM” inline email address?

The method I chose, and it’s been used since the earliest days of the WWW, was to create a small GIF that contains my contact email address. It only looks semi-cheesy, and has the advantage that spam bots can’t read it to harvest my email address to further dump more spam on top of the heaps I already receive on an hourly basis.

Now, creating this little GIF can be a challenge if you don’t own a top of the line graphics program such as Adobe PhotoShop. You could create a big honking BMP in MS Paint and somehow convert it to a GIF, but what a hassle. There is always Gimp, the open source graphics program that supposedly duplicates many of the features of PS, but I’ve yet to try it out.

My solution was to turn to my Web graphics tool of first choice: XaraXtreme from Xara Corp. Now to be honest, I don’t have a clue how to use most of the features in XaraX and based on the periodic newsletters I get from Xara, it looks like one powerful graphics program. I mean, some of the images sent in by users are breathtaking. I’m reluctant to admit it, but I spent 4 years of my life studying painting in art school, but I can only do the basics with XaraX.

But you know what? That’s really all I need to know in order to create some decent header graphics and dress up images to slap on my Websites and oh yeah, create a tiny email address GIF.

Check out my address GIF masterpiece below:

And if you want a VERY affordable and powerful graphics tool, then do yourself a favor, and have a look at XaraXtreme.

In the mean time, I’ll make more of an effort tracking down a WordPress thing-a-ma-jig to add a contact form to my blog.