Technical Data and Site Map

Moving around the website
The navigation panel on the left appears on just about every page of the website. Hover on an item to see if there is a sub-menu (indicated by this symbol ) and click a title to visit the page. Below is a map showing the structure of the site and how the pages are linked. The titles on the map are clickable, too.

Some technical stuff
This website uses server-side include technology (SSI) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for fast loading. I have to frankly admit that the site is designed and tested only for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

With apologies to the 4% of visitors who are still using Netscape, I am afraid that I did not feel the considerable work required to design and publish a complete duplicate site for Netscape was worth the extra effort, sorry. That goes for  Safari (2.4%), and Konqueror (1.5%),. I think it works OK with Opera (0.2% of site visitors) but have only tested a few sample pages.

The use of CSS, layers and a few instances of absolute positioning can cause problems for page translation services that do not import style sheets, or expand tables to accommodate longer text strings. If you use such a service, tell the providers what they are doing wrong.

Some graphics and most menus are generated by DHTML and utilize JavaScript. There are also some pages generated by PHP, SQL database queries and Perl/CGI scripting. The site is optimized for Internet Explorer 6+  and Mozilla Firefox 2.0+ at 1024x768 and is suitable for viewing at 800x600 resolution. It works OK at 600X480 but the text will appear enormous so you will need to use the horizontal scroll bars for many pages. It's also OK at higher resolutions, but unless you have a huge monitor some text will appear very small. I recommend you reduce your browser window to around 1200x900 or there will be a lot of empty space on the pages.

If you are viewing the site with the images turned off use an image placeholder to preserve the text layout. You're gonna miss a lot of good stuff, but you will still be able to read the site.

Accessibility
For visitors using Accessibility, I have tried my best to make this site as friendly as possible. I have used alt text titles or additional text for all the structural graphics. So I hope you enjoy the site - please let me know if there's anything more I can do to improve it from your point of view.

Navigation problems
If you are using Internet Explorer 7 you should know that Javascript is not enabled in that browser as a default, you have to install it manually otherwise the main navigation and several other components of this website will not function. It also blocks a lot of my pages because it thinks my menu scripts are a security risk. If you are one of the 24% of unfortunate IE users that have installed IE7, my commiserations. I hope you find a way to step back to IE 6 before you go nuts. Better still, take a look at Firefox.

If you find empty spaces where you are expecting navigation bars or buttons, it probably means you are using an old browser that doesn't recognize the modern features used on this site. Or, maybe you have got a modern browser, but you haven't turned the new features on yet! But if you do find something that seems to be an error on the site, I would be very grateful if you would be kind enough to let me know so I can fix it. I revised the site for compatibility with Firefox early in 2006, so this is particularly applicable to Firefox users. "How grateful will you be, Bob?" Gee, I dunno, maybe I'll give something away . . .

Copyright Issues
Many pages on this website include protected script locations, and copyrighted photographs, artwork or text. These pages and images are encrypted to prevent hot-linking, leeching and copying. None of these measures are hack-proof of course, but it does slow casual thieves and spammers down a bit. To see what happens when a protected image is copied or hot-linked, save this one and view the saved copy.

I know a lot of visitors will not like these measures and I'm sorry if you are inconvenienced, but there is so much copyright theft and plagiarism going on these days and I can't think of any other way of dealing with the problem. I trawl the internet every month or so and usually find two or three new websites that have illegally reproduced my text or images without giving credit. I do take legal action when necessary but it's an awful waste of time and money that I would prefer to avoid, so I am hoping these protection methods will help reduce my lawyer's bills to a more manageable level.

If you genuinely want any of my stuff for personal use, email me explaining what it is for and I will do my best to oblige. Most of the information and some of the pictures on the Rune Meanings pages are also used in my book "Casting the Runes" which is available in hard copy or as an eBook. Please see the rune products - Books and rune products - CD-ROMs/Downloads pages for prices. If you just want the rune meanings pages as a handy reference you could download the Rune Reminder eBook for US$4.95. It's based on the Rune Meanings pages on this site, contains all the same information on 28 pages in full color together with a lot of new photographs. to buy it now.

Unfortunately, I am unable to provide copies of pictures or text from the pages on Rune History, Anglo-Saxon Art and Rune Monuments because they include photographs that do not belong to me.

Virus Detection problems
If you have anti-virus software that blocks a page from loading it probably means the application needs reconfiguring. Many virus scanning applications use default settings that will block pages that contain code they do not recognize, including the bits and pieces of encryption described in the above paragraph. The entire website is subjected to continuous real-time virus scanning by Symantec on the server, so it is unlikely that you will ever encounter a real virus on any of my pages.

Privacy Policy
Runemaker.com subscribes to the Runemaker Group Privacy Policy. Click here to read it.

Editorial policy
You won't find any banner advertising on this site (except for the remotely-hosted guest book), and very few commercial messages except for the links page and me plugging my own products. Neither will you find a lot of fancy sound effects, music, animations, shockwave, flash animations, video clips, XML or other flashy stuff on this site. I would rather spend my creation time (and, more importantly, your download time) giving you lots of useful information in clear, plain English with attractive and relevant pictures.

And speaking of plain English: Brits - please excuse me for using mostly North American expressions and spellings - about 80% of my visitors are from the USA and Canada, so it was a majority decision.

OK, that's all the excuses out of the way. Enjoy your visit! Have a crack at the Rune Quiz and check out my Specials page. Here's the map . . . . . .