Philip Goddard's websites — Site Notes

The design of these sites — and why NOT neptunethemystic.co.uk!

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're 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.

Why NOT neptunethemystic.co.uk?

As for the domain names I've used, one thing is worth explaining here. Originally I had just one website, and that had just the default name of (username).force9.co.uk. Eventually I took advantage of the single free .co.uk domain offered by my ISP and took up what seemed to me at the time to be an absolutely brilliant domain name: neptunethemystic.co.uk.

As the site became several, so I simply made each supposedly separate site to be just a subfolder of neptunethemystic.co.uk, so I had that supposedly wonderful domain name hovering over my whole set of websites, and appearing to make some sort of 'statement' about me personally as well as about the sites' contents.

At the time, I was getting seriously side-tracked into the 'spirituality' phenomenon, and was seeing myself then as a 'mystic'. Also, I strongly resonated with Gustav Holst's music in his The Planets suite — particularly the rarefied music of the last movement of that work, which was actually entitled Neptune the Mystic. But then, as a result of the various 'healing' methods that I took on (actually very harmful, as I explain in My own self-actualization process or 'path' — Part 1 and "Am I a healer?" — Explaining 'healing' and the problems it causes), and then my starting to 'channel' in late 2003, I dropped myself deep in the brown stuff by opening myself to serious and disruptive interferences and attacks from a very troublesome 'universal' influence that I came, with good reason, to call the garbage.

By late 2004, when I was still in the thick of those tribulations, I'd come to recognise that the very notion of 'Neptune the Mystic' was actually 'of the dark side'. In other words, it had strong 'resonance' connections with outlooks and imagery that cultivated openness and vulnerability to the astral non-reality and what it contained — the garbage and all its means of interference and attack. It wasn't till 2007 that I finally started getting a really comprehensive understanding of just how much the garbage permeates and distorts and limits ALL people's life experience. At least in recognising, back then in 2004, that 'Neptune the Mystic' was a notion or image that I needed to keep well clear of, I'd had a quite remarkable flash of clarity considering the general confusion that the garbage was inflicting upon me at that pretty desperate time.

It was thus in December 2004 that I transferred my website complex to the much more prosaic but at least usefully informative philipgoddard.com. Some time subsequently I split off the different sites each to have their own respective domain names, for that's much better practice for a variety of reasons. However, having discarded the neptunethemystic.co.uk domain, I subsequently found that it had been grabbed by an unscrupulous domain parking / squatting business with a particular interest in gambling, so that for quite a number of years people seeking my website(s) got landed where they most certainly didn't want to go. Thankfully, however, I now find that the domain does appear to have vanished.

That's still not completely the end of the story, though, because if you do a Web search for neptunethemystic(.co.uk) you will find various (very) obsolete references to me and my websites at that old address. They are something of an embarrassment to me nowadays, as some of them pronounce me to be a 'Dzogchen Master' and 'founder of Divine Consciousness Reiki' and other things that I got clear of as soon as I hauled myself out of the confusions and convoluted fictions that the garbage had been getting me to engage with.

It's amazing how so many site owners don't bother to check links on their sites and remove ones that are broken or no longer pointing to the right place. I gave up trying to get site owners to change or remove such obsolete links. Many of them appear not to have updated their sites since the sites were originally set up — which makes one wonder why the hell they don't just delete the sites if they're no longer interested in them.

Neptunethemystic.co.uk revisited…

Amazingly belatedly, in February 2024 I decided to rectify that situation as far as one could at all so long after the event, by re-owning the neptunethemystic.co.uk domain name and setting up a miniature, one-page site on it, entitled — surprise, surprise! — Philip Goddard's 'Neptune the Mystic' site revisited.

My sites 'go secure'!

As from 24 November 2016, my Self Realization site has had an active SSL certificate, which meant that its basic URL started with https instead of http. Connections using that URL are encrypted (i.e., secure) ones. In practical terms this measure was hardly necessary security-wise, because nobody's being asked for private personal information on any of my sites. Where they are asked for passwords, credit card details and the like, it's on secure pages on the respective PayPal or Amazon site.

Then in January 2017 I changed hosting company for all my sites, from the so-widely known and heavily advertised 1&1 to the much less well-known but highly reputed and really quite outstanding Kualo, who actually provide a much better service in various ways, while not costing materially more for the privilege. Kualo enabled me to have a free, no-hassle, auto-renewing, SSL certificate for each of my sites, so they're all now set up to operate with secure https connections.

None of my sites is an e-commerce one where really sensitive personal information is entered, and so really on the face of it my sites hardly require such a security measure. However, it's now fairly general knowledge that search engines nowadays give sites without an https version a certain ranking disadvantage, and indeed nowadays browsers are starting to seek to actively discourage users from visiting http-only sites.

So really at this time it simply doesn't make sense for any 'serious' site to continue without a properly signed SSL certificate, especially as we have the odd hosting companies who let you have free SSL certificates — and indeed including Kualo, who actively encourage and assist their customers to use them, though still having more prestigious paid-for ones available too.

Please let me know if you run into any problems with the site's redirection system, which is supposed to ensure that all requests for pages or other files at the http version of the respective site of mine are all immediately changed to the https version of that URL. Thank you.

Compatibility with mobile phone type devices

It had been clear policy of mine to ignore the requirements of such mobile devices for a site to display properly, apart from doing my best to keep my page design as flexible as reasonably possible. However, in June 2015 I discovered a 'Responsive View' facility in Pale Moon, my regular browser at that time, which enabled me to easily and quickly test pages for compatibility with different display sizes, and it turned out to be much easier than expected to make all my pages reasonably mobile-friendly.

At that time I wasn't properly supporting normal mobile phone screen size (unless the user used landscape mode), but nowadays all my pages are designed for minimum screen width of 320px, which theoretically makes my sites fully mobile-friendly. However, some pages, especially on my Clarity-of-Being site, are really too long to be convenient on a mobile phone — and there's not much I can do about that, though I may split the odd further one into two where that is really practical from a design / content perspective.

Accessibility Policy

For a fair number of years the design of my sites had 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 minimum that was practical. My notional aim is eventually to make this whole site fully accessible to all comers, but that's a big task that I cannot realistically be expected to accomplish quickly, and I'm doubtful whether it would be really workable to take to completion. I do, however, review accessibility as I update elements of page design on my sites, and this is an ongoing process.

Privacy Policy

Right from the beginning I set up my five websites all to respect visitors' privacy, and not to track them. Indeed, I use no cookies at all, and I have employed no 'spying' techniques such as web bugs.

I do carry out a check of my daily website statistics, but these don't show visitors' personal information apart from certain technical details — their host or IP address, their browser, their operating system, and usually any search text that they've used in order to find the particular page they've requested. That's standard data supplied by any hosting company. I don't share that information with anyone, and unlike various organisations, I do NOT put my website logfiles online for others to see — an incredibly stupid thing for any person or organisation ever to do, because of all sorts of problems that are caused or exacerbated by that practice.

The forms that I use for contact or visitors' book entry do ask for your email address, but I guarantee that those addresses and any other personal information that you may supply (such as postal address, required for some purposes) won't be passed on to any third parties, nor placed in public view — except in the very unlikely event of it being required in the course of a criminal investigation or legal proceedings or serious misconduct of a particular site visitor.

I also give assurance that I'm very proactive with regard to security on my computer and websites, and I've still not had one instance of my computer or any of my websites being infected or compromised by any 'virus' or hacking attempt, since starting with my first computer (1986 or 87); I first went online in late 1997.

Thus so far I have a spotless track record with regard to keeping my data and sites secure. Also, through daily examination of very detailed activity statistics of all my websites, I'd know at least within a day if any of the sites had been hacked, and, because I keep my master copy of all the sites on my own computer (with a multi-prong backup strategy), I could at once simply re-upload the whole of the affected site, while also wiping out any files / folders / configurations that hackers had put there.

One notable security feature of my sites is that, apart from a particularly secure form-mail script, they don't use any server-side software such as FCKEditor, Wordpress or the multitude of other server-side systems people use to run or edit their pages. Thus my sites lack the great security hazards that so many have. I'm reminded of that great advantage every day when I examine my website statistics and see the long lists of attempts to locate Wordpress, FCKEditor and all manner of server-side scripts (which fortunately are not there to be found), clearly for the purpose of hacking the respective site.

So, while 100% safety is more of an ideal than a reality anywhere in our life experience, my sites must be very high in the safety stakes as compared with sites generally.

The Facebook 'Like' and 'Share' buttons now replaced with more benign 'Share' button

The small standard Facebook 'Like and 'Share' buttons that had (dis)graced the top of all my significant content pages (on all my sites) have been replaced, as from late September 2021, by a more conspicuous and enticing home-made 'Share' button.

This isn't just a cosmetic change. For one thing, I'd come to the conclusion that the Like button was probably harming rather than helping my sites' reputation in the eyes of the majority of site visitors, who have the 'sheep' mentality — so it would be really worthwhile to abandon for that reason alone.

Secondly, both the standard Like and Share buttons used an actually hideously large embedded script, which lengthened page loading times and had been an unnecessary drain on many mobile users' data allowance. One purpose of that script is to further Facebook's tracking of its users across all sites with FB buttons — regardless of whether those people click on the buttons. That's sneaky and rather disreputable practice, and I'm glad to see the back of it on my sites.

What's significant about the new Share button isn't just its appearance and size but also that it isn't using an embedded script. Instead, it uses a special 'share' URL — a plain hyperlink. That means faster page loading times and no tracking of any visitors to any of my sites. Of course, however, anyone who clicks on that button is taken to a Facebook page, so they do get tracked — but then anyone who uses Facebook is at least tacitly consenting to FB tracking them anyway.

There's still a catch, however, because I found that that 'share' URL doesn't work properly on at least a fair proportion of mobile phones, and this is a long-standing issue that Facebook has shown no interest in fixing despite many complaints. For this reason, to avoid annoyance and reports of the problem to me, I've pragmatically chosen to make that button invisible to all devices up to 480px viewport width, which should cover just about all mobile phones.

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

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), even if they are notionally allowed 'unlimited' bandwidth (the hosting companies generally had some sort of 'fair use' policy), and it's a type of THEFT to use somebody else's bandwidth for your own site or in a forum — quite apart from the copyright infringement that's 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 don't 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 give no guarantee that I won't 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 aren't 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's 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 uncapitalize the filename in the link.

  Another error is where a local link (i.e., filename without path) has been copied on one page in my web page editor and then pasted into another page. Windows often adds the full local path then, and sometimes I forget to check whether that's happened. Of course a local file-system path would be meaningless on a page once it's uploaded, so the link wouldn't work there, even though it would still work fine on my local copies of the pages.

• Warning! Deep (=direct) links or direct accesses to individual MP3, zip and image files on this site won't 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.

• Warning! Please don't use whole-site download agents. If you do try to download a whole site you will likely just get a 'forbidden access' response for every page or file request — but in some cases, where a mass download apparently starts okay, you'd most likely find that your IP address gets automatically banned from all my sites — i.e., at the point where your mass downloader has fallen into one of the site's bot traps.

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.

However, to listen to recordings of the works, my music site is the place to be, for information about the works and links for listening to the respective YouTube videos.

"I've enjoyed your music compositions at YouTube, but is there any source for higher-quality downloads of them?"

I researched a number of outlets for downloads for my music and natural soundscape recordings, but so far have come to the conclusion that they all in their different ways are not worthwhile for me to use. They're geared up for high-volume sales (primarily of pop music), and would be a liability for my stuff.

I've therefore (in 2020) added download versions (CD-quality, FLAC-compressed) of my recordings to my Music and Natural Soundscapes CD-quality download catalogues, but without a formal shopping cart system. So, at least for the moment this works through informal sales — the site visitor contacting me with details of each required item, and at the appropriate point, paying through my Donations / Payments page.

Printing web pages from these sites

I encourage people generally NOT to make a practice of printing out my pages, and rather, to bookmark the particular pages. That's much more environmentally friendly, and costs you much less money, and ensures that you get the most recent version of each page (many are frequently updated, especially on my Clarity of Being site).

If you're determined to print pages, 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. Browsers differ in the text size used to print a particular page, so you'd have to experiment (use Print Preview) 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.

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 wouldn't only be against my wishes but would also be breach of copyright. As it is, one inconsiderate website owner 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's 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 emailed the website owner 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 email 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've installed invisible traps for spambots at the top of every page on each of my sites as part of my ongoing programme of progressively excluding from this site all unwelcome robots that I can detect. However, on contact forms I've made the bot trap in the form itself visible and indeed conspicuous, with a warning. I've done that because otherwise anyone who uses auto-form-filling software will automatically get banned from all my sites because the bot-trap field had been filled-in.

If you do get banned, no worries, though!  What you need to do then is to use the contact form linked to on the Forbidden Access page to enable me to unban you and, if necessary, whitelist you. Please make sure to include in your message all likely relevant details of what you were doing, and which page you were on, when you got banned. I could then check through the appropriate logfile to verify that your surfing behaviour wasn't that of a robot (robots usually give themselves away by doing certain things), and then I'd remove the block that had automatically been put on your host address, and in most cases could fix the issue in one of my 'bad bots' filters that had erroneously identified your browser as a bad bot — or may recommend a passphrase for you to add to your browser's user-agent string, to let you through (the Forbidden Access page actually gives info as to how to go about that).

How you can 'donate' without paying extra for the privilege…

Because the 'Buy now' links in my Bookstore are Amazon affiliate ones (new, October 2017), there is now a brilliant way that some people can 'donate' and assist me and my sites, time and time again, if they're finding any of the sites helpful / beneficial, and without paying a single dime extra for the privilege!

All they need to remember to do is, anytime they intend to shop at either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, first to go to my Bookstore. That would take them to the respective Amazon product page, and then from there they could search / navigate to wherever they wanted on the Amazon site and do whatever shopping they were going to do. Amazon does have a cap on affiliate payments for very expensive purchases, so if, for example, anyone bought their own private jet airliner from Amazon after clicking on one of my links I wouldn't see more than some $200 from that — but I'd still be very happy at receiving even just that much out of their purchase! 

N.B. Currently this applies only to people ordering from the USA or UK. The Amazon affiliate programs are not Amazon-wide but country-specific. I've enrolled in the USA and UK affiliate programs, and unfortunately anyone in any other country who orders anything through my affiliate links wouldn't generate me any affiliate income, though of course I'd still get due royalty payments from their purchases of anything that I'm offering in my stores. I see it as really not being practical for me to enrol in additional affiliate programs because that would require too many links to work well in my page design — especially for mobile devices — though I'm keeping the matter under review and might just possibly include Canada at some point.

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 email from someone for whom the site has meant something. Please do stop to leave your mark.