Kenninghall Creations

As a surprise for my birthday my wife got tickets for the Rush concert here in Toronto. I’ve been listening to this group since my high school days (25+ years ago) and I never saw them play live before. What an awesome show! They played most of my favorites during the show as well as a selection from their new album, Snakes and Arrows, which sounds pretty good.

Here’s “Far Cry”, one of the songs from the album:

I used to have a default e-mail box setup to receive e-mail sent to my domain that didn’t correspond to an actual e-mail address in my hosting account. In theory it’s a way of making sure you get e-mails even if the sender misspells something other than the domain. Some use a default mailbox so they can deliberately use different e-mail addresses for specific recipients as a way to figure out who passes on those addresses to third parties. Well, after having this for a few months, it is pretty obvious it is not worth doing. Out of of about 2500 e-mails received, only 2 were legitimate, 900 were spam sent to my domain, and the rest were “backscatter” after some spammer used my domain to spoof sender addresses. What is backscatter? Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

Backscatter of email spam
The term “backscatter” is also used to describe a side-effect of email spam, viruses and worms. In this context, an alternate, more distinguishing term “outscatter” is also used, since the traffic isn’t directed to the original destination, but to a third party instead. Since a 2002 Klez variant[1], a large proportion of malignant email is sent with a forged sender address, but some mail servers do not take this into account. They generate bounce messages for spam or viruses – which of course go to an innocent party.

Conclusion – I won’t be using a default mailbox for kenninghall.com anymore.

One of the sites I’m working on is a t-shirt review site. The process of selecting a CMS for the site is taking quite a while, and I’m not prepared to take any short cuts in choosing the right one. In the meantime I’m running a blogger site about t-shirts that will serve as a proving ground for the full blown site. That blogger site is called Time For T. Check it out.

I’m finally getting the site relaunched. Kenninghall Creations is now hosted at BlueFur.com (formerly MonsterHosting.ca) with which I am quite pleased after a month with their service.

 I really like this WordPress theme called i-feel-dirty which I hope to continue using. It needs a little tweaking to fix a few minor problems, but the real test will be trying to make my homepage use the same design so that everything works together well. For now I’ve borrowed some code from my family photo gallery site for the basic homepage which gives me a place to start, but it is rather crude.

 On the project side, I’m re-writing the family site to make the maintenance process less cumbersome. The new design will automatically read the folder structure and build the gallery pages dynamically instead of my having to code each one. Offline I am writing a utility to automatically resize my photos to the thumbnail and final sizes I use on the site.

The Sandbox areas of Kenninghall Creations are where I’m running tests or evaluating other applications. Right now I’m learning and comparing Drupal and Joomla to see if either is suitable for a new site I’m building. If neither are right then my host has a number of other CMS’s available through Fantastico, or I may end up going the build it route.

Welcome back to Kenninghall Creations