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!
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.
