Site Notes

The design of this site

This site has grown in piecemeal fashion since late 1997 from a very small and crude beginning as a very basic 'shop window' for my literary works (only). It eventually split off from my personal site and took on its own identity. All along, because I was presenting significant content, I wanted to sidestep all temptation to copy others who create 'professional'-looking websites full of frames (slow loading, often a cluttered screen, and impossible for most search engines to index), distracting logos, images and animations, and taking an age to load into one's browser.

I seek in this site to put priority on clarity, directness and fast loading. Any graphic or picture here has to have strong justification for its inclusion; it must point to or enhance the content and 'message' without adding distraction or unduly lengthening page loading time. I totally exclude animations, for they are a great distraction from the contents of a serious site such as this. For this reason too I use plain colours and for the most part not images as backgrounds for text, and keep them to light colours for maximum readability.

Light pastel colours in any case resonate with and encourage a clear-minded and expansive outlook and have minimal resonance with the extremely problematical astral sub-reality of illusion and delusion (whereas the colours used for the vast majority of 'spirituality' sites resonate strongly with it), and thus are particularly appropriate for sites which truly aim to benefit people. Those running or thinking of setting up spirituality-oriented sites would do well to heed this latter point, and to read this site's introduction and start understanding what extremely serious trouble their 'spirituality' is leading them into.

Accessibility Policy

The original design of the site was carried out with no regard to accessibility for the special browsers and screen readers used by visually impaired people. In particular I used tables extensively for various layout purposes, and I didn't give any of the tables 'summary' attributes. Tables are notorious for their incomprehensibility to such screen readers.

I now use a minimum of tables for layout purposes, wherever possible using CSS for layout.

My aim is eventually to make this whole site fully accessible to all comers, but that is a big task that I cannot realistically be expected to accomplish quickly. I am, however, regularly making further accessibility-oriented changes, and this is an ongoing process.

If you have any particular accessibility recommendations concerning this site, I would be interested to hear from you about it - though I'm really interested only in genuine assistance with accessibility, for I'm well aware that many people simply feel that they have to nitpick and make issues in order to impose their will upon others, and I'm not interested in that sort of agenda.

When images fail to appear and there are just 'broken image reference' icons or an 'Image blocked' image showing

Occasionally new images may not be correctly referenced, so that I then need to correct the image link on the appropriate page (usually a matter of capitalization in the filename, or the inadvertent use of a path on my local system for the file). Generally I would notice and correct any such problem within a few days of its appearing, because it would show up on my daily web statistics.

Deep linking is antisocial

To use an image or a sound file on a website of yours or in, say, a forum, which is sourced from a file on somebody else's website, without the site-owner's or webmaster's permission, is antisocial as well as extremely discourteous and usually a copyright infringement. Most websites, including this one, have a limit upon the amount of bandwidth they can use (i.e. their volume of traffic), and it is a type of THEFT to use somebody else's bandwidth for your own site or in a forum - quite apart from the copyright infringement which is involved.

I have a daily inspection of the previous day's statistics and, when necessary, the raw logfile for this site, and I can tell generally when a deep link is being used, what file the link is to and where the link itself is situated.

Where necessary I can change a filename and this site's references to it so that a particular deep link completely ceases to operate, and in such cases with images, all visitors to the rogue deep linking site will see the above image in place of the intended one.

I therefore ask that people who want to use files from this site write to me to seek my permission to use them, and then, if that is granted (which it usually would be), to host copies of the particular images on another site so that they are not stealing any of this site's bandwidth. Where permission has been granted and files from this site are used, they should in all cases be credited to me, with a link to this site. Fair's fair.

Requests for reciprocal links

Although currently I have a page for reciprocal links, I'm considering abandoning this because virtually no sites on the current list are compatible with the new, clearer and more balanced outlook of this site - so no new entries will be accepted, at least for the moment.

You want to make a page from this site available to others...

Please feel free to link to any page here (but not directly to images or files offered for download), but do not place a copy on any other site, at least without my express written permission. To do so would not only be against my wishes but would also be breach of copyright. As it is, one inconsiderate webmaster has placed a copy of my substantial text On Finding a Path Towards Wholeness on their site without any reference to me. Although it is fully credited, no link is given to this site, and the text is out of date as I have made various major revisions and additions since that copy was stolen. That is in particularly bad taste as it is supposedly a spirituality site, which itself is asking for financial donations, and when I e-mailed the webmaster about that I got no response whatsoever. Please don't be another hypocrite like that.

In case you fall into one of my spambot traps...

Spambots are programs that automatically surf the Web collecting e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending them spam. Many of these deliberately access pages that are forbidden for all robots. For example, one from Poland that showed up in the relevant logfile for my site read the robots exclusion list, evidently saw that the Visitors' Book pages were forbidden, and went straight for those particular pages and no others at all.

I have installed invisible traps for spambots on the five main home pages as part of my ongoing programme of progressively excluding from this site all unwelcome robots that I can detect. The prime purpose is to reduce the risk of any e-mail addresses used on this site getting onto spammers' lists. No ordinary human visitor should get caught - it would be extremely difficult to do so even if you knew where the traps were and really tried to get caught.
To be more specific, each of those five pages contains two widely separated one-pixel images which are each hyperlinked to particular folders to which access is forbidden for all robots. Only badly behaved or indeed overtly malicious robot software would follow those links, and any accesses to those folders would be picked up in this site's logfiles so that I could then bar the particular host addresses from this site.
If by some fluke you do inadvertently click on one of these hidden links and get my 'Got you!' page (extremely difficult to do even if you try hard), you MUST e-mail me the same or next day to tell me what's happened. I could then check through the appropriate logfile to verify that your surfing behaviour was not that of a robot (robots usually give themselves away by doing certain things), and then would remove any block that I'd put on your host address. This is also stated on the 'Got you!' page, for anyone who actually reads it is unlikely to be one of the robots that I want to ban.

Do say 'Hello'!

I know I'm by no means the only person to be running a site with significant content that benefits many people and yet who gets extremely few entries in the site's visitors' book. It can be quite disheartening to be putting so much into a site for the benefit of others and to have a whole month pass sometimes with hundreds of visitors but without a single entry in the visitors' book or even one direct e-mail from someone for whom the site has meant something. Please do stop to leave your mark.