I was on holiday for most of last week and a little of this week, so I’m joining the weeks together in this update.  During this time I worked on several different projects and communicated with a number of people about new research projects.

Whilst at the DH2025 conference in Lisbon Jennifer Smith alerted me to a problem with the sending of emails on the Scots Syntax Atlas site.  We have a couple of contact forms (including one for requesting the audio files generated by the project) and neither were working.  I’d also spotted that the two-factor authentication plugin used when logging into the WordPress admin interface was failing to send the emails containing the log-in codes.  This took an awfully long time to sort out as it was unclear what was causing the problem or whose responsibility it was to fix it, compounded by the fact that the site is hosted by an external company.  I’d noticed that several other of our externally hosted sites had the same issue with sending the 2FA emails so it appeared to be more widespread than just one site.

I spoke to Andrew McHugh, the head of RCaaS in IT Services and he suggested contacting the third party hosting company’s support.  I had a long and useful chat with their support people, who suggested that we’d need to update the DNS setting relating to mail for the scotssyntaxatlas.ac.uk domain (which Glasgow controls) to point to the hosting company’s email systems.  This would then enable me to set up SMTP for email for the domain and hopefully get the emails sending again.  I therefore submitted a helpdesk request to Glasgow’s IT people asking them to update the record.

At the same time, I wasn’t convinced that this would solve the problem, and it was very strange that the 2FA issue was only affecting certain sites and not others.  I realised that it was only the sites that had their own domain rather than being a subdomain of Glasgow that were being affected.  I spoke to Luca who confirmed that this was also the case for one of his sites that had its own domain.  It was also strange that the WordFence summary emails for these sites were getting sent, which suggested that emails were somehow working.  I eventually realised that the 2FA emails were being sent from the email address ‘wp2fa@domain’ while the WordFence emails were being sent from ‘wordpress@domain’.  There was an optin in the 2FA plugin to change the email address its messages were sent from so I set this to ‘wordpress@domain’ and… the messages came through.

It turns out that the University must have blacklisted the ‘wp2fa@domain’ emails, meaning all messages from these addresses were being blocked.  So there was never an issue with the sending of emails for the domains – the messages were being sent but were being blocked and changing the email address to ‘wordpress@domain’ allowed them to get through.

This meant that what I thought was one problem was actually two, as the contact forms on the Scots Syntax Atlas site were still broken.  I’d noticed previously that there appeared to be an issue with the contact forms’ use of Google ReCaptcha, but when I’d disabled this the forms still failed to send.  Now I knew the problem was definitely related to the contact form plugin I could investigate this further.  I made a copy of the contact form details and then completely deleted the contact form plugin, then reinstalled it and set up the forms again without any involvement with ReCaptcha.  Thankfully this fixed the issue and the contact forms successfully sent their emails.  It does mean that there may be a lot more spam sent to the email address that receives the messages, and we’ll just need to keep an eye on this.

Also during this period I continued to work with the Fife Place-names data.  Previously I’d written a script to add latitude and longitude to all of the place-name data (more than 3000 records) that previously only had grid references.  I’d run into some issues with some of the grid references, as discussed previously, and this meant researching the correct grid references to use, which took a bit of time.  I managed to complete this process during these two weeks, successfully adding latitude and longitude to all but 50 of the records.  These 50 records are mostly for obsolete place-names that don’t have a specific location, and I’ve emailed the project PI Simon Saylor to ask about these.

During this time I also set up a new project website for Gavin Miller and migrated the emblems websites over to a new server in an attempt to ensure the sites don’t use up all of the server’s resources, which was occasionally happening with the previous hosting arrangement.  I also made some further updates to the Robert Fegusson online exhibition, based on feedback and further data from Amy Wilcockson.

Most of the remainder of my time was spent working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language.  I had an email conversation with Ann regarding the new part of speech tagging system and a further email conversation with Becca, William and Vasilis about the new structure of the DSL entry XML files.  I now have some sample data and some helpful explanatory notes about the new structure so an upcoming task will be to ensure the DSL’s online systems can work with this new structure.

I also had an online meeting with Vasilis, Becca and William on Friday to discuss the new region and dialect area maps that will be added to the DSL website.  This was a very useful meeting and we went through Vasilis’ prototype and discussed how this could be turned into a resource that would work on mobile devices as well as larger monitors and how we could make access to the large amount of overlapping spatial data a little less confusing.  I then began writing a specification document for the new feature and will continue with this next week.

Also this week I had email conversations with Emanuele Scieri of Theology and Mícheál Ó Mainnín, a place-names scholar at Queen’s University Belfast about new projects that I may be involved with.  I can’t say much more about these for now, but I’ll be having online meetings to discuss their proposals in the next week.