This is based on a JavaScript function written by Andrew Urquhart, a man with a good Scottish name. So, laddies and lassies, please note that I just wrote the HTML, not the function that does the actual work.

One of the ways that spammers get your email address is by having "robots" surf the web automatically, picking up email addresses off of web pages. These robots are getting smarter, and are able to discern email addresses that were previously hidden.

A technique they don't seem to have been able to break, though, is the encoding of an email address into an "HTML entity string." These entities are representations of characters by their ASCII codes, which are numeric values corresponding to a letter or character. For example, the ASCII number that represents the letter "A" is "65," so the HTML entity code for the letter "A" is "&#65."

If you put your email address (or any other string) into the first field below and click the encode link, it will put the proper string into the second field. You can then copy and paste that string anywhere into your pages that the string (say, your email address) needs to appear. You can see that I've already done this myself if you "View page source" on any of my pages. It seems to be working pretty well; I've yet to get spam to the "alaina.webcrawler" email address.