Site Improvements
Sun May 23 2010 by MarkP
Over the last month some minor improvements have been made to this site. One of the main issues was implementing a CAPTCHA system to prevent "spam attacks" when submitting form data. Initially I was a bit wary of using a CAPTCHA based system due to issues with accessibility and the negative feedback it tends to receive in general.
I reviewed a few alternatives which tended to rely on javascript, the basic premise being to distinguish between an actual
form post orignating from the actual page rather than a faked post as implemented by many of the spam bots trawling the web.
Not being 100% convinced by this decided to research third party CAPTCHA systems that can be easily plugged into a website with very little
configuration. After some "googling" I decided to implement Recaptcha onto the site.
All in all its a really neat plugin, my only issue being that I can never understand the audio that is generated, so may revisit this at a later date.
Another improvement was to include the facility to be able to retrieve my CV as a Microsoft Word docx or Adobe PDF file. Many employment agencies wanted to be able to retrieve a Word version of my CV so this option was added to the CV request form.
As the blog engine is generated using XML there was an issue relating to the HTML being stripped out when retrieving data from an XElement value in Linq. To work around this an extension method was created:
1: public static string PreserveHtml(this XElement xElement)
2: {
3: if (xElement == null) return string.Empty;
4:
5: var content = new StringBuilder();
6: foreach (XNode node in xElement.Nodes())
7: {
8: content.Append(node.ToString(SaveOptions.DisableFormatting));
9: }
10:
11: return content.ToString();
12: }
This ensured the HTML in the description was preserved and formatted correctly in the RSS Feed.
