My web page

[AusRob]

Hi all,
I have added my URL to my signature, but have substituted an * for an "n". I don't wish to offend anyone, so I'll remove it if you want, but I thought you might like to see some of my other work. (I can export BTW)

Regards,

Rob

[MilDoc]

Hey! That is some dam* fine furniture!

Thanks for posting!

[Stytooner]

Great stuff! I like square tables if a room will suit it. There a lot of stuff you can put in the center. Ice sculptures come to mind.

About the link, though. If you website is on the internet, changing a symbol will only serve to PO people. The only case I could see doing this is if you have limited bandwidth and more cost extra.

What you did is perfectly acceptable for email addresses, but crawlers already have your website page. No need to be secretive there.

Great website, too!. Let folks look.

[cabinetman]

Hi all,
I have added my URL to my signature, but have substituted an * for an "n". I don't wish to offend anyone, so I'll remove it if you want, but I thought you might like to see some of my other work. (I can export BTW)

Regards,

Rob

For some reason your link doesn't open up. Probably forum scrutiny of the wording.
.

[AusRob]

Hi again,
I cannot use the real word as it is a censored word. So you need to substitute the n for the asterisk.
As I said I don't want to offend any one or create a fuss.

Regards,

Rob

[pelligrini]

If you would change the link in your sig to [#url=http://www.****finefurniture.com/]http://www.dam*finefurniture.com/[url#] removing the # signs it would look the same but resolve to your site. You can also substitute any text in between the first end ']' and the '[url'

like:
My Dam* Fine Furniture Website


LOL - nevermind.... the site's bad word filter doesn't like it. It'll asterisk it out in the url too.

[shoottx]

Neat stuff

And a great website. Yup ya gotta change the * to an N.

[RayintheUK]

Hi again,
I cannot use the real word as it is a censored word. So you need to substitute the n for the asterisk.

No need, Rob. If visitors click on your name, there's a direct link to your site there! Great woodworking, BTW!

Ray.

[Alex Franke]

Try this link: http://www.dam%6efinefurniture.com/ - not a "bad" word, but still successfully resolves.

I love the chairs.

[pelligrini]

How'd you do that Alex?

[Alex Franke]

How'd you do that Alex?

Short answer is this: I "escaped" one of the characters in the offending word.

Technical answer is this: Because only certain characters are allowed or considered valid in a URL (web site address), there's a way called "escaping" or "encoding" that allows otherwise invalid characters to be included by translating them into a form that only uses valid characters. For example, a space, which is typically not allowed in a URL can be encoded as "%20", which are all characters that are allowed. The percent sign is the escape character, and the 20 is the ASCII value of the space character in hexadecimal. (If you type "www.bt3[space]central.com" into your browser you'll probably see that it encodes it as www.bt3%20central.com for you.)

The browser knows to look for the escape character (the %) and then insert the character represented by the ASCII code following it as the next character in the string. To add the actual escape character to the string, you can escape it -- so to add a %, you just add "%25", where the 25 is the ASCII valud for % in hex.

This works for valid characters, too, which is why it works in the link. The browser sees the "%6e" and says, "oh, I'm supposed to insert an 'n' here instead because the ASCII character set defines 'n' as '6e' in hexadecimal." (It's true -- if you listen really carefully you'll actually hear it saying that )

The forum software doesn't recognize "dam%6e" as a dirty word, so it's not bleeped.

[pelligrini]

OK, I've seen the %20 inserted for spaces all the time but I never really knew why. Thanks for the info.