Ben from OpenSwitch gave me the heads up about this intriguing flash animation showing the expansion of the “major� religions for the past 5,000 years. It is very interesting and definitely worth the 90 seconds of your time.

Originally posted here.

In October Tyndale’s Web Steering Committee gave me the mandate to rebuild the Tyndale front entry page as well as create more robust front entry pages for the University College and The Seminary. The goal was to have these 3 pages launched before Christmas break.

We started from scratch – with input from the committee, Academic Deans, Communication department and others, we developed a new look and feel for theses pages. I realized quickly we could not just do these pages alone as some of the new content on these pages required other pages for support. There was no point in creating these sub-pages in the old look so content templates were also created.

I am proud to announce on behalf of the Web Steering Committee that this project launched at 7:15 this morning!
Swing by and have a look:

http://www.tyndale.ca

http://www.tyndale.ca/universitycollege
http://www.tyndale.ca/seminary

In addition we have added some new great content to support these pages – I will speak on these soon – for now have a look at the new interactive map/location page:

http://www.tyndale.ca/about/map.php

I have also had time to port the Foundation and About sections into the new look and feel. I am not sure at what point we will be able to port the rest of the site to this new look – the Web Steering Committee will have to look at this in the near future.

If you would like to leave comments please do below!

I am sure most of you get at least one spam message a day – me – I get hundreds. Now I have been around a while and have some very public email addresses (webmaster@, webserver@ etc.) so my spam may be greater than some. Well here at Tyndale we have been fighting another form of spam – form spam.

Web forms are a great way to gather information from our web visitors – sometimes we get information and send it off to staff or faculty – sometimes we take it and store it in a database – sometimes we even post that stored information on our web site directly – like Alumni news.

Web forms are also a great way for spammers to send their spam. The spammers write programs (spam-bots) that scour the web looking for forms to fill out making sure to include their message in the content. Their hope is that people will not check their form data and the spammers content will get posted online or sent through to email.

We have many forms throughout our web site. Some of these forms have been found by the spam-bots and have been receiving a great amount of spam entries. In an attempt to squash these we have installed Akismet – Akismet analyzes our form content to determine whether it is spam or not and sends back the result – we then determine what to do with that information. We log all the spam attempts and we record all real data as we normally would.

Here are some quick statistics regard spam attempts in the Alumni section of our web site:

Since September 28, 2006 we have blocked 20,291 attempts to submit spam through our forms. Today alone – from 12:01 am to 9:15 am we have blocked 147 attempts.

Are you having problems with a form on the Tyndale web site. Submit a HelpDesk request and let us know – we will work towards a solution for you.