About this site

 

 

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Management

This site is maintained by Peter Bowditch. As well as being a Vice President of Australian Skeptics Inc and looking after this site, Peter is also the boss and chief decision maker of the RatbagsDotCom Empire and the Executive Officer of the Australian Council Against Health Fraud. In real life he is a computer consultant, and his employer donates some of his billable hours to allow him to maintain this site.

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Site design

The look and feel of this site was developed by Spring in Alaska. All subsequent development and programming, including the design of the database which controls much of the minutiae of site management, was done by Peter Bowditch.

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Privacy Policy

The only information about visitors to this site which is examined or kept is that which is provided voluntarily by someone sending email to an email address on the site.

We will not sell or provide any details obtained through this site or through any other of our activities to anyone unless ordered to do so by a properly constituted court with appropriate jurisdiction.

The only time web server logs are looked at is when it is necessary to do so to solve site management problems. The traffic recorded in the logs is not analysed in any way except to produce consolidated statistics such as numbers of visitors and page displays. (The software used for the analysis is WebLog Expert).

Cookies
This site does not use cookies.

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Medical Advice

While there might be much on this site which is critical of medical quackery, there is no medical advice here. If you are sick or think you are sick, you should see a doctor. That means a real doctor, not someone who pretends to be a doctor. The only advice of a medical nature here is in the form of warnings against liars, charlatans, quacks, thieves and other vermin who claim to have cures for things for which there is no cure, treatments for non-existent ailments, or medical advice, products and treatments which have no scientific (or in many cases logical) validity.

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The Technology

Several pieces of software are used to manage and maintain this site.

• Microsoft FrontPage 2003 is used for overall site management and editing individual pages. No FrontPage server extensions are used, and where any server-end functions are required they are written in Perl.
• An Access 2003 database holds much of the information used to build and maintain this site. Access writes out files that FrontPage uses to build various listing pages and JavaScript routines.
• Ipswitch WS_FTP Pro is used to transfer the pages to the server. This program allows both transfer of single pages and a semi-automated process that transfers all changed pages in a batch.
• The editor used for Perl and JavaScript programming is "Programmer's File Editor" by Alan Phillips.
• The site search system is based on the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine.
• Style sheets are maintained with TopStyle Pro.
• Image processing is done with Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. 90% of PhotoShop's capabilities for 20% of the price.
• Link checking is done using Xenu's Link Sleuth. Not only does this do an excellent job of finding broken links, but it produces a file that Access can read to update the links database, and, as an added bonus, using Xenu is a way of sneering at the Cult of $cientology.
• The ideas for JavaScript routines tend to come from The JavaScript Source and JavaScript Kit.
• WebPosition Gold runs on a regular basis to automatically push the site into the most important search engines.
• NavStudio 2005 is used to create and maintain DHTML menus.
• WebLog Expert is used to analyse server logs to get visitor and browser statistics.
• The embedded MP3 player used throughout the site to play sound files was developed by Jeroen Wijering, and is used here under a Creative Commons licence.

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Browser compatibility and standards

This site is checked regularly using these browser versions. All testing is done under Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.

The graphs show the percentage of visitors to the site using particular browsers and operating systems in the most recent full calendar month.

Style sheets used comply with CSS Level 2 specifications. Some text may be a little larger on screen for users who do not have the "Courier New" font installed, but as this has been a standard font for all Windows and Macintosh versions for the last few years and is also a part of most Linux distributions, this is not a high-priority problem.

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Missing links

External links from this site are checked regularly, but no matter how often we check we cannot guarantee that all the links from this site will take you to where you expect to go, or even take you anywhere at all. We apologise for any inconvenience, but the web simply will not stand still.

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Changes made to this site:

Last 7 days:

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Last 30 days: