Philip Goddard's Websites - Site Notes

The design of these sites

These sites have 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). All along, because I was presenting significant content, I wanted to sidestep all temptation to emulate 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 my sites 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 this sort of context are in any case generally more harmonious to our non-physical aspects, and thus are particularly appropriate for sites whose content promotes true self realization.

Redesign of this site's pages in 2003

In the spring of 2003, I redesigned most of this site's pages to give a more consistent approach to layout, for the first time using the now-fashionable CSS (cascading style sheets).  This will unfortunately cause problems for some (mostly old) browsers which don't handle CSS well or even don't recognise that system at all.  In such cases some of the page formatting will be awry, and some style effects will not appear.

Netscape 4 and to a lesser extent Internet Explorer 4 are notorious for their bugginess in coping with CSS.  If you are using one of those, I exhort you to upgrade to a more recent version, for they cannot correctly display many modern web pages, and website developers cannot be expected forever to limit their design to accommodate old and buggy browser versions.

In order to minimize problems for such browsers, I have kept to a simple use of CSS. However, my best advice to anyone who does experience problems is, please do upgrade your browser to a modern one which fully supports CSS standards, because that is the system now used almost universally by professional website builders. Firefox still appears to be the browser of choice - at least for a PC running Windows.

Accessibility Policy

The abovementioned redesign 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.

In 2006 I reduced this site's reliance on tables for normal layout purposes to the absolute minmum that was practical. 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, reviewing accessbility as I update elements of page design on my sites, and this is an ongoing process.

When images fail to appear and there are just 'broken image reference' icons

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). In fact when this happens I become aware of the problem within a day or two because it shows on my detailed website traffic statistics, and I then correct the problem.

Deep linking is antisocial

Most or all of your visitors will see this or a very similar image
if you try deep linking to an image on one of my sites.

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.

This site has a block upon deep linking to sound files and zip files. This block isn't 100% effective, and so a minority of people would still find deep links to this site working. However, that isn't the end of the story, because 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.

In the case of images, in order to ensure that no bona-fide site visitors find that images are blocked on my sites, I do not have any block on images by default, BUT when I notice from my website traffic statistics that another site (usually a forum) has deep-linked to an image, I then block access to all requests for that image from that site. Warning: I reserve the right to replace blocked images with highly unsuitable material to teach the deep-linkers a lesson!

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.

About downloading from this site

• All download links from my web pages are intended to work - surprise, surprise! Occasionally, however, especially in the case of new links, an error slips through and a link doesn't work. Please do let me know if you find one of these. Usually what has happened is that my software has put in the link a capitalized version of the name of the file to be downloaded, whereas all files that I upload have their names in lower case - and on most Net servers filenames are case sensitive. So almost always when I get a report of a download link not working I just have to decapitalize the filename in the link.
• Warning! Deep (=direct) links or direct accesses to individual MP3, zip and image files on this site will not work for most people, so please do not pass on such links to other people. Instead, pass on the address of the web page from which the particular file(s) can be accessed. So, for example, don't bookmark or pass on the link http://www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk/soundfiles/golgo-exc.mp3, but do by all means pass on the link http://www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk/golgo.htm, from which the MP3 file can be downloaded.

Where's the best place to go for my music?

I have a publisher - Musik Fabrik - from where you can buy scores and sheet music of a selection of my works, but to listen to recordings of the works, this site is the place to be. My publisher simply links back to this site for information about the works and the downloadable MP3 files for listening.

Please be aware that this site is not intended to be a source for mass downloads of free entertainment. Its purpose in providing MP3 files is as a shop window and educational source, so that people can sample my music, and, if they like what they hear from a selection of excerpts, it is then open to them to follow that up by the CD-ROM or (as available) scores of the music. Warning - mass downloaders are liable to be barred from future downloading from this site.

Printing web pages from this site

My short stories, some of my poetry and all of my spirituality articles are provided as web pages, which load directly into your browser. I strongly recommend that before you print any of them out from your browser you ensure that the browser is set to a small text size. In the case of Internet Explorer the smallest text size is ideal, as it prints at about 9 point. Netscape and Mozilla reduce text size much more, so clearly users of these browsers would have to experiment to find a suitable size for printing. Beware that if you don't take this measure you may find that the default text size results in your wasting a lot of paper because of unnecessarily large print. Another alternative, which is a good idea if you're prepared to do a little tidying up and reformatting, is to save the pages as HTML files on your own system and then load them into Word or a similar wordprocessor that can read web pages. Then within the wordprocessor you have proper control over formatting, fonts and pagination, and then also you have the option of saving the files in the wordprocessor's own format.

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 placed a copy of a substantial text of mine - 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 became out of date as I made various major revisions and additions since that copy was stolen, and now the particular page is completely obsolete and I have altogether discarded the genuine original, and I don't want to be associated at all with the antiquated stolen copy. That is in particularly bad taste as that site 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. The world can do without hypocrites 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), it's best to 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.