Keri Henare

It has been an incredibly long 11 months (to the day) since I last posted on this blog. Sorry.

I had originally planned a quick redesign back in about April 2006, but then I went travelling. And then I came to England. And then I just never seemed to have the time. I took the blog down in an attempt to motivate me to get something done, but that didn't work. What can I say, other than :

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.

I'm now in the middle of a redesign and the development of a custom content management system powered by CakePHP. In the meantime, I have put this simple Wordpress blog back up simply because I don't feel that I can keep quiet. I need to Blog! This isn't official Version 3 of KeriHenare.com, more like Version 3 Prologue. This isn't a reflection of the finished product but something to get me moving along.

Jeremy Keith is probably my favourite AJAX specialist, especially with his focus on Hijax. So I was really happy to hear that he's now written a book. Bulletproof Ajax looks like it's going to be a great book for those of us who want to experiment more with AJAX but aren't necessarily JavaScript pros. It's definitely going on my shopping list. (via)

Before I started traveling around I handled all of my email from Mozilla Thunderbird on my Desktop PC using POP3. Thunderbird's spam filtering was great at filtering my spam client-side and I was content. But then I sold my PC and started traveling. I quickly switched to using the RoundCube webmail client (I could have used DreamHost's default SquirrelMail but it's ugly as hell) but ran out of time to configure SpamAssassin to protect my inbox from the torrent of junk floating through cyberspace. So I traveled the globe, often with little time to check with my email, sometimes weeks apart... and the spam piled up.

Now that I'm settled down in the UK I finally got to tackle the spam problem. I started with a new clean shell account on DreamHost and installed the latest versions of SpamAssassin and its dependencies. I directed all of my email addresses into the new account and moved all of my old emails over too. Finally I installed the latest Thunderbird onto my MacBook (yes I prefer it to OS X Mail) and am now using IMAP so that I can still access my email from anywhere. I'm slowly training SpamAssassin to filter my emails properly, it's already got things 90% right on a fresh install. This will improve week by week.

I also google'd my email address and removed it from various pages and websites to avoid it being picked up by spiders. On my contact page I've used some PHP to generate a unique email address based on the users IP address and the time and date. This should help me keep track of the spam coming in. The only place that I haven't hidden my email address is my C.V. as I think that'd do more harm then good.

I've finally got the upper hand in my battle with spam,

This is something that I've been meaning to post about for ages but haven't gotten around to, so I'll do it quickly now.

While surfing through my Mint Stats one day I found inbound links from Microformats + DOM / AJAX = Mashup Nirvana, a presentation by Kevin Lawver a developer at AOL. The reason for the links was that Kevin mentioned my C.V. as an example of the hResume microformat. I've been really committed to microformats so this is a great honour. Thanks Kevin.

When I originally wrote my portfolio into the website... well I don't know what the hell I was thinking. There were no links and it instead used JavaScript to pop-up a window based on the id attribute value. Obviously I was asleep that day. It was completely non-accessible and you had to have JavaScript enabled just to view any piece.

Thankfully my live redesign broke the portfolio. Thus I was forced to rewrite the html completely. It's now 100% accessible. On the final redesign I'll use some unobtrusive JavaScript to hijax the link and open it in a new window if JavaScript is enabled.

Meanwhile development of the new redesign is going amazingly! I'm really happy with how things are shaping up and I can't wait to show off the new design to the world.

Rather than waiting til the final design I've thrown in some quick JavaScript to open portfolio items in a new window.