Edward Hopper and Josephine

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I enjoyed Edward Hopper’s work quite a bit as an undergraduate in art school. Who doesn’t like the moody, dark, impenetrable scenes he pictured of America’s depression and it’s aftermath? Especially when you’re 22.

“New York Movie” - 1939

Don’t get me wrong. I still love his work – his use of colour in particular. He knew how to paint light. What I didn’t know was his wife’s name was Josephine, and that she was also a painter. Amazing what tidbits an education leaves out. How did I come to know about her?

Fonts.  Yep. While trying to come about with something different (yet quick) for the front page of this much neglected site (the old adage about the shoemaker’s son and no shoes) I thought I’d just dig into the font collection I acquired a few years ago. And right there below Hopper > Edward, was Hopper > Josephine.

According to the wiki, her work Jo’s watercolor Movie Theater—Gloucester influenced Edward’s interest in theatres. A quick (is there any other type) google search did not produce any images, sadly.

Sharing Plug-Ins for WordPress

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First, there are too many of them! 1,000+ results for the term “share” on the WP plug-in site.

I just tried out about 8 of them for this blog and for a client’s blog. In the past I used to put the developer code in myself, but that seemed too tedious.

  • AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
  • Digg Digg
  • Share This
  • Jet Pack

and four others I’ve already deleted and forgotten about:)

For this blog I am temporarily using WP’s Jet Pack as I’m curious how the WordPress.com stats compare to google analytics. I only chose 3 icons (FBlike, twitter & g+) so out of the box it doesn’t look so hot when you rollover, as there are spaces missing. I’ll wait to see if I keep it before I customize the css.

For the client’s site, Jet Pack  feels a bit overkill at the moment. I liked AddThis, but didn’t like the way it added it’s own promo when you tweeted something. I found Digg Digg not so nice to configure. I ended up choosing Share This for the client’s site as I found it simple enough, effective and clean. A little bit of tweaking was necessary that involves “code” eg: you can’t select which icons you want to have – you need to manually type : fblike,twitter,plusone  . So it’s not super intuitive. But it’s simple and seems good enough for now.

 

 

SPF record – aka anti email spoofing

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I set up SPF records for 4 domains 4 days ago. An SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record “is an email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses” (WikiPedia)

Since we’re using Media Temple DV server, I followed their guidelines. (which they’ve since updated with a correct link to an SPF wizard btw – the old wizard link didn’t work so they helped me on the phone which was great ).

On diamedia.net I was getting about ~5-10 spoofed emails a day (that appear to be coming from your own domain ie: accounting @ diamedia.net etc). On the other domains about 3 a day. But some days it could be higher.

How long does the SPF record transition take?

DNS records take about 24-48 hours to update. I’ve always thought this was exaggerated, however that was using the lens of how long it takes local servers to update to switching hosts, for example. I was never thinking about servers in Russia or Italy.

I set up a temporary folder in my email to move these emails (moved them manually) to keep track.

Day 1: 8 spoofed emails
Day 2: 5 spoofed emails
Day 3: 1 spoofed email
Day 4: 1 spoofed email

So, it appears to be working. I used a soft-fail (accept and tag any non-compliant mail) which is different than hard-fail (bounce any mail that doesn’t comply) so this is how the Day 3 and Day 4 are getting through. Actually Day 4 used google servers, which I have set up to allow google to be a mail server. I might switch this.
[ v=spf1 a:example.com/20 include:_spf.google.com ~all ]

I also will probably switch to a hard-fail once I am 100% sure about what this entails.

This was something I have been wanting to do for ages, but kept on putting off because it seemed to be gobbledeegook. Now I can cross that off the list and not add it to New Year’s Resolutions for 2012.

It’s Christmas Eve. Back to helping out Santa’s Elves.