We will assume that you have read and understand this document, even if you have done neither.

Personal relationships and privacy

Do not assume that you know everything there is to know about us simply because you read this blog on a daily, weekly, or irregular basis. Any judgements you make will be based on the information we have provided. This information may tend to be vague, incomplete, embellished, or deliberately inaccurate. Whatever opinion you may form on the author as a person, or their life as a whole, is probably best kept to yourself. Remember, you are the reader.

It is generally best that readers do not contact for more details on events or personal information than are already posted. If you are close, you may eventually find out by some route. Intrusive questions are not necessary, and mostly unwelcome. If you are meant to know, you will.

If you have a real life relationship with the author, remember that communication is very important. Treat this as a diary hidden under the pillowcase. Referrer logs will tell me that you read my site, so please don't pretend you don't.

It is important that as a friend, relative, co-worker, or whatever you may be, that your readership doesn't impede our expression. This is an outlet for the writer, not your entertainment. It is possible that we may not want you to read certain things about you or others you care about, in order to spare your feelings, avoid drama, or maintain my privacy.

If we write about you and you don't appreciate it, drop a comment or mail you about it. There are many compromises that can be reached from using vague nicknames to protect your anonymity, or not mentioning you at all. We're prepared to work this out for anyone.

Ex-friends, lovers, estranged family members, and others who have been cut out of our life may wish to refrain from reading.

Feedback and initiating contact

Criticisms and reproaches are fine if you have a problem with something, but try to remain constructive and not be a moron. No one is forcing you to give out your opinions, so if you don't have anything remotely positive to say, it may be best to keep quiet.

We owe you no response. Shocking as it may be, the author has a full life. Sometimes we'll write back immediately, other times it'll just never happen. Don't take it personally, because chances are it has more to do with lack of time than anything else.

For those few people we name by name: you are known in your own right by (at least) a significant minority of the British public. Congratulations. Where we claiming to know you, we will provide sufficient evidence to ascertain indentity, or explain how we met, or both. If you don't remember us from Adam, that is both our problems.

You can find a working email address on every page we've published since 2004, and some older ones. If you know us from somewhere else, you know how to reach us. If you're not clever, you can't find my email address, and can't contact us. This is by design.

We retain the right to stop writing at any time and for any reason we see fit, and at no point need we justify or explain these reasons to you or any reader.

Offensive language and materials

The internet is a place that encourages free and creative expression, and as in any environment where people are given this freedom, conflict may arise. If we use language or materials that offend you, leave. Contacting us or our ISP demanding the removal of the content is absurd because you are viewing their content of your own free will. Simply stop coming here and you won't have to see whatever it is you don't like.

If you send us a threat of unjustified legal action, we will not respond to it; but we will post it here, or elsewhere, entirely at our option, for the derision of right-thinking people. See also the next section.

Unsolicited Email Policy

This site does not use unsolicited bulk email or any other form of "spam," and does not knowingly contract with any Internet service providers that condone its use. The sending of unsolicited bulk or commercial email to or from any address in the "daweaver.free-online.co.uk" domain, and the use of this domain's mail servers to send or relay such email, is expressly prohibited. Again, we will splatter egg and publicly humiliate anyone who does.

Nothing on this site insists on your email address or any other information about you; even the comments can be published anonymously. If you choose to contact the webmaster, portions of your email may be included in the site content. Under no circumstances - including as the result of court orders - will we publish or disclose your email address or other contact information without your express permission.

By sending an email to ANY address ending "daweaver.free-online.co.uk", you are agreeing that:

1. We are the intended recipient.
2. All information in the email is ours to do with as we see fit and make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends itself to. In particular, we may quote it in full or in part, here or elsewhere, at our sole discretion.
3. We may take the contents as representing the views of your company or other organisation.
4. This overrides any disclaimer or statement of confidentiality that may be included on your message.

If you do not agree to any part of this agreement, do not send email.

Copyright and courtesy

Copyright is formally claimed for all original writing on this site for a period of ten years after the original date of creation. Readers are permitted to reproduce portions under fair use doctrine; we request a link back to the original article. If you wish to reproduce a substantial chunk of information, please ask first.

Caching, Mirroring, and Archiving Materials on this site may not be cached, mirrored, or archived, except on a single computer for the personal use of one individual, without the express permission of the site owner. The site owner gives express permission for archive.org to maintain a cache in its usual operation; the google cache has been explicitly disallowed.

Linking Policy

You are free to link to this site, unless (1) you are a spammer, a content rating service, or a vendor of spamware or censorware, or (2) we have specifically asked you not to link to us.

"Deep links" to individual HTML pages within this site are fully permitted, though we reserve the absolute discretion to change URLs. Framed links are discouraged, and we may use hostile Java applets and other tools to retaliate against unauthorized framed links. Direct links to non-HTML files (including embedding of images) are not permitted, and we reserve the right to make technical alterations to block such abuse.

This site does not participate in reciprocal link agreements.

Optimization

This site uses clean, simple, standard HTML which should be clear and readable by any browser, including text only browsers. We have aimed for some level of accessibility by design, but accessibility has mostly been a side effect of using proper standards based structural mark-up with a focus on content, instead of attempting to manipulate decorations. This site sticks rigidly to internet standards in website design, which is the only proper way to do things.

For those who like graphical browsers, our recommendation is Mozilla Firefox, which since its inception has always been the browser that implements standards the best. Firebird is available for all operating systems. While the goal is for standards compliant pages which will work with any browsers, Phoenix is what we use most.

Only a few of the pages have been tested with Internet Explorer, more testing is done with lynx.

Privacy Policy

We will do as we damn well please with any and all information that visitors to this site permit us to collect, including but not limited to posting it online for everyone to see; using it for blackmail; and selling it to telemarketers, the Inland Revenue, or the MI5. Just as soon as we work out how to sell it to telemarketers for fun and/or profit, that is...

Standard web-access logs are collected, as are collected on almost every website. These include the IP address of the connection, the time of the request, the page requested, the results of that request (was it successfully honoured, how many bytes transfered, etc), how your browser chooses to identify itself, and any referrer information your browser chooses to provide. You can conceal any of that information (other than the page requested and the status of the request) by using an anonymizing proxy server if you wish.

Logs are routinely kept for a calendar month, are analyzed for rough statistics, and certain trends may be published on the site. Logs are inspected more closely to identify errors or unusual trends. We do attempt to block advertising sites and over-zealous spiders by referrer and IP address.

With the exception of labelled popup boxes and the comments system, nothing here uses JavaScript, so there is no sniffing of email addresses through those well known JavaScript tricks.

There are no cookies, there is no cookie tracking.

RSS aggregators

We provide the RSS feed on an as-is basis. We currently provide two feeds - one giving the first 500 (or so) words of articles, and a shorter feed giving summaries. A micro-feed of this and other sites is available through Ice Crystals. As RSS does not include the stylesheet formatting, readers will lose some semantic markup. Certain automated aggregators are automatically redirected to a shorter summary feed; this is entirely at our discretion. We reserve the right to suspend or discontinue the service at any time.

We validate the RSS feed most days; should any visitor or subscriber note an error, please advise us.

The RSS feed of this site is for personal and non-commercial use only. Any attempt to display the content derived from the RSS feed on the same visual page as any advertisement will be deemed commercial use. Commercial users may only use the short feed, and we will forcibly redirect them to this feed.

Blocked access

We do not recognise the jurisdiction of the self-proclaimed United States, or any of the individual provinces, kingdoms, and territories currently subsumed under that entity. We will terminate the export of data via RSS to companies based in that area, using force if necessary.

This site withdrew permission for Google to crawl or index its pages in January 2006. This applies to all Google engines, including its RSS reader, and its acquisitions Netvibes and Feedster.

As of October 2007, the following restrictions are in place:

• Banned entirely: Bloglines, Turnitin, Rojo.
• Direct links disallowed: Myspace (image files only), obvious spam sites.
• Bots redirected to short RSS feed: Feedster, LWP, Newsgate, Comet, Nextgen, Blogpulse, Livejournal, Netvibes.

All of the above are explicitly barred from Ice Crystals.

As of May 2008, we are experimentally allowing links in from Google-mail, under strict conditions. The summary for Google sites:

• Googlebot remains barred.
• Any references in from a Google site are barred, unless they are allowed by a following clause.
• References in from Google Mail (referrer contains the strings google and mail) to specific HTML pages (containing htm or the front page) are allowed.
• References in from Google Mail to graphics files are specifically barred, under the standard image blocking.

Credits

Partly based on a similar document at namaii.com