Day: 27 May 2004

New Entries Or Broken Images?

Some site maintenance notes regarding broken images in some feed readers and entries reported as new when they are not.

Just in case you are reading this via a feed/RSS reader of some kind – like Bloglines– then you might be seeing your reader marking a whole stack of entries as new when they are, clearly, not. I’ve made some minor code changes to the site to have the feeds validate with the Feed Validator as well as link to the comments from the feed. Additionally, I’ve added a couple of Movable Type plug-ins that will help me keep the rest of the site validated. Nothing major, but it does mean some of the entries have been marked as updated when it’s just the background code that has been amended.

If you happen to use a web-based feed reader or aggregator, you may see that images are broken. I’ve prevented images from being called if the referrer is not this site because some of the images from the Man of the Moment section were being called by external sites, and I don’t want to end up paying for that bandwidth. It’s not intended to stop people from reading the site from seeing anything, so let me know what reader you use, and I will try to open images up to the relevant domains.

Junk Mail Is Now 70% Of All Mail

Junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide, according to filtering firm MessageLabs.

There are a lot of reports around at the moment about the levels of spam.BBC News is saying that junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide. If this is true, then I am doing rather better than most people. You may recall that my ISP is Demon, which introduced spam filtering earlier this year. This has had a fantastic impact on the levels of spam I receive. Curnow.org is hosted with DreamHost, which uses razor spam filtering server-side, and then I use Mozilla’s junk mail filter at my end of the chain. If one message a day gets through, then I am surprised indeed. I’m so used to this level of filtering that I hardly ever look at the spam folder. I just looked at it, and while there are lots of pre-filtered messages, none of them was the mails I should have had. All in all, this is working very well indeed.