As of January 6, 2007 I have now been working at Tyndale for 15 years!

Wow how time flies…

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.

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.

I am more-or-less testing using video on the blog here – just grabbed a You Tube video of the Tyndale Talons basketball team taking a nice 3point shot!

A Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

Believe it or not – I have a life outside of Tyndale
I have been involved in youth ministry for many years now and one of the highlights of every year for me is the annual retreat. This year we returned to Medeba for the fourth year in a row. It is a great facility and I am kinda partial to it being on the board

This year I had asked the Tyndale worship team (Colin, John and Joshua) if they would consider coming to do the worship. They accepted and joined us this weekend for a great time. As usual they did a great job and represented Tyndale well. I just wanted to say a special thanks to them for their help.

see more photos

Tyndale’s Internet presence began in 1996 with less than a dozen static web pages.

Today the tyndale.ca domain hosts over 5,300 static and dynamically created public web pages.

To generate these pages it takes over 28,000 files (code, graphics, pdf etc.) which collectively consist of over 700mb of data.

The www.tyndale.ca domain has over 70 “top-level� folders in the file structure.

In September 2006 we had 15, 306 unique visitors to tyndale.ca consisting of 33,016 visits and 822, 834 pages viewed.

The majority of content within the main web site is managed by our custom Content Management System (CMS) based on Dynamic Publishing Architecture (DPA).

There are 33 user accounts on the main www.tyndale.ca domain used for user and department generated content.

Since September 28, 2006 we have had over 9,140 attempts to post spam in the Alumni News/comments section of our web site. These have been stoped.

The tyndale.ca Internet ventures span over 6 servers with this number continuing to grow.
Domains hosted on our servers include:
www.tyndale.ca, students.tyndale.ca, cat.tyndale.ca, secure.tyndale.ca, gw.tyndale.ca, main.tyndale.ca, www.brianstiller.com, www.christiancareerscanada.com, www.hudsontaylorcentre.com, www.timcentre.com, www.designed4life.org