Category Archives: News

Things, Goings On, and Stuff I write

SPF on HE.net

If you’re hosted by he.net like I am you have access to edit your DNS records. I host my email on an Alt-N MDaemon server, but I was able to add SPF records to my DNS to allow me to help prevent spam messages from being sent out from my domain. The DNS record looked like this:

randypeterman.com IN TXT “v=spf1 a mx ?all”

This tells the servers that are SPF aware that they need to only accept mail from my ‘A’ DNS mail record and that if the message doesn’t come from that server, it’s spam.

For more information on SPF go to http://spf.pobox.com

Eat spam, but don’t spread it.

2nd of July

This morning two cute girls were lined up at my door seeking my affection: My bride and my daughter. I’ve got some more pictures of Abby to put up so I’ll try to get that done by the end of today. She’s sure behaving funny right now because several of her teeth are coming through.

In other news John Kerry broke new fundraising records for a presidential campaign fund raiser/raider. I believe the number is 175 Million for one fund raider. Why does any campaign need that much?

A Review of MSN’s New Search Interface

MSN has created a new version of its search engine and along with that comes a new interface. On first glimpse it looks nice, it’s rather blocky feeling compared to the last iteration and minimalist which is better for load times, but it feels naked compared to Google.

Usability
The new interface is usable, you can get what you need done relatively quickly because they’ve not got a lot of extra interface distractions, but leaves room for improvement. To MSN’s credit they didn’t add an advertisement to the inital search page, which is atypical for MSN, they love to make money on any page they show.

However, the search results page leaves me asking, “Are there only 10 results?” You get your default number of results and then you have to turn your search engine on: you must locate the ‘next’ links. The ‘next’ links were carefully placed in the right hand side looking inconspicuous rather than prominently displayed. To MSN’s credit there are not a lot of ads on the results page either.

Speed
The MSN search speed is pretty quick, not quite as quick as Google, but close enough that most users will not notice a difference. I did not do a benchmark test because I didn’t see that as a huge difference from my user perception.

How Good Are the Results?
I’m not sure how good the results are compared to Google on a full scale comparison because as one guy without some powerful application, I can’t do a head to head comparison. I searched for two phrases I know link to my site from Google: ‘Randy Peterman’ and ‘Women of Walmart.’ The Randy Peterman search returned almost identically to Google, however ‘Women of Walmart’ turned up nothing for my site on the first several pages (at which point I stopped). To MSN’s credit www.randypeterman.com is probably not where most people want to go for ‘information’ on ‘Women of Walmart’ 🙂

How Much Work Do I Get Done

Matt asks, “About how many hours of productive work do you get done a day?” I put about 9-11 hours of work in a day, but I’ve got several clients and my largest keeps me busy with at least 40 hours a week. No complaints here, busy is good. Because I have fewer interuptions at my home office I have pretty fruitful time.

StatTraq Screenshot

As promised in an earlier post, I’m working on a stats management system for WordPress, here’s a screenshot of the Summary View.

I’m working on implementing the plugin API right now.

Also, for the record I see that there are a few inconsistancies between the phrases/terms used. I’m going to fix those before the beta goes out.

Also, what things would you like in a WordPress statistics plugin?

Spider-Man 2

We’re going to see Spider-Man 2 today at 4:30! Woo-Hoo!

OK, so seriously, I have high hopes for this movie, the first one was so excellent that I must go see this one. And if it is 3/4 as good it will be a good movie, but if it’s half as good I’ll want the extra $2.00 we paid to Fandango to avoid lines back 🙂

Validation Rocks

The The W3C Markup Validation Service makes writing good markup easier because once you think you’re done you can validate and make sure you’ve crossed your eyes and dotted your teas. I’m in the process of converting WorldClient into standards compliant code (except in LookOut which is an absolute pipedream due to the hacks, IE 5.5+ only code and large amount of duct-tape and bailing wire used to make it ‘work’).

However, the conversion process started a wee slow but has sped up as I’ve discovered the usual reasons why things aren’t validated. Man did I write some bad code before I learned about web standards. I also didn’t have a good grasp on document types before this either, so this is a good education. I had no idea that & was a requirement in URL’s for HTML 4.0. All of the supposed 4.0 markup I had done previously was full of regular "&X=Y" types of URL‘s instead of the correct way to code.

In WorldClient a username and password is required to get into the pages so the best way I’ve found to get things validated is to login with Opera
and open up the ‘info’ bar and copy the path to the cache file into Firefox (because Opera barfs for no reason when I open up the validator in another page) on the other monitor and have the validator validate an uploaded file.

Thanks you W3C!