Fri, 26th Feb 2010 by Alfie.

Welcome to another major site update.

A friend asked me if I could put an RSS feed on my site, so I set one up manually.  He then mentioned it would be good to have a comments system as well. I checked out my host’s site to see what I could cook up, but rather than manually build something with the minimal CGI on my package, or upgrade to some heavier grade hosting with full CGI/PHP, I found out that my host provides WordPress!

So, I have finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the fully Web 2.0 world with a blog. The WordPress implementation isn’t as customisable as I’d like, but does provide all the ‘pretty’ features and beats running my own server.

I will migrate across as much of the original content as possible, but I cannot  have both old and new on one domain for some reason

Enjoy

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Wed, 24th Feb 2010 by Alfie.

By popular demand (of at least one person!) I have added an RSS feed to the site.

I hadn’t bothered previously as updates were few and far between, but now I seem to be averaging 3 updates a month it might actually be worthwhile

Update: and within minutes I’ve been syndicated on LiveJournal!

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Fri, 22nd Jan 2010 by Alfie.

I’ve completed a major cleansing of the links section, but there’s still far too many for one page and I still haven’t got about to making it validate properly

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Fri, 19th Jun 2009 by Alfie.

I have added a private and a temporary area to the main menu links. These were always included in my sites but usually left hidden with no direct links from the public pages.

The Private Area is for sharing personal, password-protected, pages with close friends and family, typically mini-galleries of family events, so nothing worth hacking the password for

The Temporary Area is for sharing non-permanent public pages, typically for when I want to pass a file to someone over the ‘net, so rather than mail it to them, I upload and link it.

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Tue, 16th Jun 2009 by Alfie.

I have added a simple Site Map page to help people find both the older pages and where I may have simplified URLs for the new pages.

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Thu, 11th Jun 2009 by Alfie.

I’ve implemented some rounded corners on box content based upon Greg Johnson’s Spiffy Corners, so all pages will show an updated date of today.

Some versions of Internet Explorer were doing something weird with the padding, so I’ve added some padding wrappers to stop it ‘blowing up’ the box model. This makes the HTML layout a bit more complex, and hence not as ‘clean and simple’ as previously, but I think that the effect is worth it.

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Tue, 26th May 2009 by Alfie.

I’m finally uploading my re-designed site!

I’ve been tinkering with new designs for over a year now; 2-column, 3-column, fluid columns, floating columns, faux columns, fixed footers, many boxes, rounded boxes, image borders, with/without scripts, etc, but there would always be one thing or another that either didn’t work the way that I wanted it to in a particular browser, or required too many hacks, or made ‘accessibility’ too awkward to manage, etc.

Eventually, I decided on this relatively ‘clean and simple’ 2-column layout. I hope that you like it.

If there are any pages which you used to visit that are currently missing from the re-design, then you can still find them under the Old Site section for the time being.

I’ll likely be tweaking the site over the next month until I’m truly happy with it if any of my previous site re-designs have been anything to go by

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Sat, 23rd May 2009 by Alfie.

I’ve started receiving bounces for undelivered mail that I haven’t sent. It seems it’s my turn to have my mail domain spoofed for e-mail harvesting spam again. The spam mails appear to all be in HTML format and claim to be in response to signing up to a newsletter.

If you don’t know, ’spoofing’ is forging the address to look like it comes from someone else that you’re more likely to trust, in this case my domain, ‘delphia.co.uk’. The mail was never sent by me, or from a user on my mailserver, as I don’t actually have a ‘delphia.co.uk’ mailserver. All my mail passes through an authenticated server on my host, 1&1, and legitimate mail from me starts it’s first hop at ‘mrelayeu.kundenserver.de’ (which you’ll see in the headers).

There is nothing much that can be done about spoofing, as anyone can currently fake the sender address in an e-mail. Until something like the Sender Policy Framework or an equivalent is used by the majority of the ‘net there is no way to know if a mail is from a legitimate source.

Related: Spam Trends.

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