Hopefully my website isn't complex enough to need very much explaining; indeed, I try my best to make it quite simple and obvious. Certainly I will never go as far as The Buffy Network (I will not dignify that site with a link, but a Google search will turn it up, if you care — but beware, it's incredibly bad), which has a huge help section, mostly dedicated to explaining why it's the user's fault that the site is broken in any browser but MSIE. Oh, and the help site is on a different server because their ISP keeps suspending the main site. I find it amazing that they don't realize it would be easier to fix their site than to write and maintain all those extra pages. For that reason, I am somewhat scornful of my own small help page, but I do feel that a couple of the features on this weblog and site may merit some explanation, and I want to provide that. This is also the place for things like Terms of Use.

Terms of Use

I have written my site for the edification and enjoyment of any human who wishes to read its content in the traditional manner. I take strong objection to abusive robots, spambots, and bulk downloaders, and I have taken measures to deny access to those who would abuse my site. The reason for my objection to bulk downloaders is that they can easily be abused (for example to copy a site whole - and yes there are people who do this for some reason). Also, I don't want someone downloading every page on my site or in a section if most of those pages aren't going to be read. It's an abuse of the server and of the bandwidth I pay for.

I would like to make clear that my blocking of spambots is just to harrass them slightly, not to prevent address harvesting, since there are no email addresses on my site.

Oh, and I also take objection to spybot companies like Cyveillance, Imagelock, NameProtect, or Turnitin, all of which make money by selling trademark protection or plagiarism detection services. They do that by downloading my site, using up my bandwidth, and not paying me back anything for my contribution to their business model. These spybots often disregard robots.txt directives and/or spoof their user-agent identification in order to get around blocks like mine.

I have considered putting a Creative Commons license on my site, but I decided not to, because I am not comfortable with the idea that anyone could use something of mine without asking permission. In the case that someone actually did think something of mine good enough to republish, I would be more than happy to give permission, but I do want to be asked.

Comments

Those of you who are new to the blogging scene may not be familiar with the idea of commenting on someone else's website. I didn't have this capability on my last blog, and I was very envious of other people who had comments. Now I can just be envious of people whose blogs are more popular (or perhaps more inflammatory) than mine.

The concept of comments is fairly simple. If you want to reply to a post of mine, just click the Comments link, enter your message, and hit Submit. Since my comments are also threaded, if you want to reply to another comment, use the Reply link at the foot of that comment. Don't be bashful; if you have something you want to say, go for it.

I do not have the capability for private comments, but email will perform the same purpose of private correspondence. And speaking of privacy, name, email address, and URL are all optional in comments, and email addresses will never be displayed on the website in any shape or form.

I also have some more technical explanatory text on my comment forms:

But basically you don't have to worry about that if you don't want to. I just like to allow some HTML in case people want to get fancy.

Comment Policy

I reserve the right to remove comments if they are off-topic, abusive, or spam. I have deleted spam comments in the past and will continue to do so. In addition, comments and trackbacks are passed through a Bayesian spam filter, although currently the filter is so inaccurate that I don't actually use its results.

Spam is defined as a comment containing no message content (Yeah I agree doesn't count) and existing solely for the purpose of inserting a link onto my site. These will be deleted without notice.

Abusive comments will be treated in a similar manner to Jonathon Delacour's comment policy; that is, the message will be replaced with [message removed (abusive)] or similar.

Comment traffic is currently so low that I have a very high tolerance for off-topic comments; however, I reserve the right to remove them if they intrude on or disrupt the flow of on-topic discussion. This category of comment will be treated similarly to abusive comments.

TrackBack

TrackBack is like commenting, except that it's inter- rather than intra-blog. Movable Type has some TrackBack documentation; basically the way TrackBack works is that someone, for example Kevin, reads a post on my blog and wants to post a response on his own blog. He links to my post from his and has his blogging system send mine a ping; from that ping, my system knows that he has linked to me and adds a reciprocal link to my entry. This facilitates discussions between blogs, and those can be quite fun.

Below my entries, comments are interspersed with TrackBacks, since TrackBacks are really comments. TrackBacks are the ones that look their text was cut off in the middle, because it was.

Templates

You can view the customized templates I use to build my weblog pages. I have no claim on any of the specific code that is used, so feel free to imitate my techniques. However, I will take umbrage if your site looks exactly like mine (however flattering and unlikely that might be). Drop me a line if you like my style.

There, does that help?