MatBennett.com

Things have been busy of late, but I finally got around to throwing some more content up on this site today.

I had a lot of photos kicking around that I had promised to share with various people, so I have uploaded these. I’ve backdated everything to whenever the pictures were taken so things might seem to be in a strange order.

I was also hoping to get time to add comment functionality to the images and items, but time is moving on and I still have a huge list of chores to do. This is on the way though.

Spotted an interesting hack attempt on a couple of my sites today.

Seems that someone is testing contact forms to see if they can add to the headers they use to cause the form contents to be BCCd to additional addresses. Presumably they then use the forms to relay truck loads of spam to unsuspecting net users.

Read more »

I’ve recently noticed a growing number of “mainstream” sites utilising trackbacks on their pages. Even CNN’s all powerful news.com now has a slightly messy trackback / pingback system in place.

Not sure of the history of trackback and pingback, but both systems are heavily utilised by bloggers as a way of providing related links to a topic. The basic principal of both systems is that that one information site links to another through an article and let’s the target site know that the link is in place. The target site’s automated system then recognises this link and provides a link back.

Considering how difficult it now is to get a good relevant link, utilising trackback / pingback methods could well now be the easiest way to get links in to an information based site. I’m not talking about spamming every trackback page you can find (although I am sure that a lot of people are doing this), but instead deliberately searching for relevant articles to provide as further information sources.

I’ve only really used either method as part of out of the box news/blogging systems, but can’t imagine it would be too difficult to put a standalone module together - which is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll probably experiment with it here on this site at some point then roll it out on to relevant work projects.

It seems that yet another version of this site is now underway - (yeah I know… so many designs, so little content). I seem to have an ever growing collection of digital junk without a permenant home so I thought it about time I put together a system to house it.

When complete, this new version of matbennett.com is part CMS, part blog, part file storage and part photo gallery. For now though it is just part done.