http://designs.salem-news.com Matts Design Blog Salem-News.com Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:44:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the last few months I have come to the realization that the only way to reduce spam and other cyber crimes is to not only do what I can to keep them from using my services for those purposes but to do what I can to keep them from ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2007/11/13/responsiblity/ On Monday November 5th I realized we were undergoing a Denial of Service attack aimed at draining bandwidth. I believe it started rather weak in October but I began to notice the Kilobytes of traffic had grown far higher then it should based on other traffic statistics. See: Day 1 ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2007/11/08/denial-of-service-day-three/ Yester day I noticed that Salem-News.com was under a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS) that seemed to be aimed at using up bandwidth as at its highest rate was no more than 60 per minute and averaging less than 30 per minute, all aimed at images. See: Bandwidth DDOS ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2007/11/07/the-denial-of-service-attack-continues/ Sunday(Nov. 4th) while reviewing the stats for Salem-News I noticed the KiloBytes of traffic for the day had more than doubled without a corresponding doubling of the page views. An investigation began into what could be causing this to happen. Some possible reasons that came to mind: Large image files used in ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2007/11/07/bandwidth-ddos-attack/ While I spend most of my time adding or fixing features on Salem-News.com, every now and then I have to remember to check for validity and optimization. The first step I take is to use The W3C Markup Validation Service. An invaluable free service allowing you to easily see a broad ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2007/01/17/website-validation-and-optimization/ Shortly before noon on October 22 I was reading an newsletter from spaceweather. The Luxury Cruise to Mars advertisement caught my attention, I had to click on it but if you'll notice the www.example.com Is not a valid domain name. Clicking on it will lead to this: You have reached this web page ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2006/10/22/strange-google-gmail-ad/ I wanted to add a 3d corner effect to the posts displayed on the front page of this blog to give it less of a plain flat page. I created a quick drop shadow image with the GIMP and with a quick alteration of my templates CSS had it up. Step ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2006/10/09/3d-corner-with-gimp-and-css/ Well I got my blogs started and moved out of the main directory and into subdomains me designs.salem-news.com David tech.salem-news.com the rest sharing opinion.salem-news.com. It went well after relearning how to set up virtual hosts for the sub-domains as I havn't done that in a few months. httpd.conf ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2006/10/08/setting-up-apache-subdomains/ After installation I began editing the default wordpress theme (as I decided the first one of us to get a blog should be me for testing purposes) The basic changes done from within the administration section was fairly easy. If I was willing to set my permissions correctly I could edit ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2006/10/08/customizing-wordpress/ Over the past 24 hours I have tried a few blogging / CMS packages to allow Salem-News.com staff members to write more what they feal instead of just regurgitating the usual news. While I did find several with more features than WordPress I ended up going with it as the ... http://designs.salem-news.com/2006/10/08/installing-wordpress/