Well, the SiteMeter stats are in and only 2% of my visitors use a screen resolution under 1024×768. So I thought it was high time I widened the site design. Now, I’ll have more flexibility in my posts, being able to include medium sized Flickr photos. At 500 pixels wide, they didn’t quite fit in the old design. I redid the logo, but I think I’m getting sick of this one. When I get inspired, I’ll update it. But right now, I have a major craving for Stargate that needs satisfying ^_^
Archive for the 'Site' Category Page 2 of 2
I’ve been using a “catchall” address on frostnova.net for years now. For the non-geeks: Normally, email sent to a nonexistent address is rejected. With a catchall, any email sent to any address @frostnova.net is received. This behaviour is particularly useful for catching out spammers, e.g. I sign up to Company X using companyx@frostnova.net as my email address. If that address gets spammed, I know it was Company X. Credit to Josh for this genius idea :-)
The downside is that I get loads more spam from spambots guessing the addresses. Because anything they guess is a valid email address, in pours the spam. Pointing the catchall to Gmail helped a bit, but I still get heaps of spam, even if Gmail catches most of it. Interestingly, I was averaging about 30 spams per month before the site went live. Then spam levels started to increase. My guess is that the spambots went “Hey, look! A real domain with a real website!” and flagged it as a viable spam target. My spams-per-month now hovers between 1000 and 1500.
Today I decided to stop being a sitting duck. Now there’s only about 20 aliases that are legit and they get forwarded to Gmail. The rest go a mailbox I set up in case I forgot an alias. But eventually they will all just bounce and the spambots will move on. My hosting gets me unlimited email names so I can still use the companyx@ technique. It’s actually better this way because I can see all the fake email addresses I’ve created. Before they just existed in the massive sea of permutations (come on you maths geeks, how many?). The “experiment” is to see how Gmail spam levels behave in the next few days after the switch. When I’ve got some decent data I’ll have a chart below showing the results, so come back in about a few weeks.
Welcome to Frost Nova, my weblog. There’s not much here at the moment (duh! first post). I’ve got some articles in the works, so stay tuned. This is about the 10th design (no joke) that I’ve been through for Frost Nova, so I’d love any comments about it. The layout is inspired by the famous Kubrick theme that you see everywhere. Credit where it’s due, the code is based on Steam v1.5 although heavily modified. Steam was the simplest theme I could find close to the layout I wanted. So thanks to SteamedPenguin for that :-)
I suppose the theme’s technically still in Beta since it hasn’t been subjected to widescale testing yet, so when I’m happy that it’s final, I’ll release a download.
Well, that’s enough ranting for now, better get writing!
People Say