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Your Privacy and About This Site

Privacy Concerns

Over past few years, many have become aware and concerned about their online profile. Stanton Park has always used cookies only to help you when placing orders, or in navigating the site. This site is different, we are not using any cookies or local storage to run this site. No data is used by or sent back to Stanton Park except for any emails you choose to send us from our contact page.

We do not link to any external libraries to help facilitate your browsing on this site. However, as you navigate this site, you will notice links to external pages. They should all open in a new browser window or tab on your computer. We do not control what happens on their sites, so please be aware that their policies will be different than ours.

While the careful viewer might detect a few images that appear to be advertising on certain pages, a closer look will ascertain that these are ads that are used for illustration purposes only. They ran in print magazines over 20 years ago, and are here for archival purposes. They do not function like any advertising you see on other sites.

“First you take away the records, now the color?”

While there are “splashes of color” on the site, the overall color scheme is grayscale. You probably have also noticed a layout that recalls a print newspaper. As I started this redesign I created a few mock-ups of concepts I was considering. But none of them looked very good and truth be told, I was having a better time messing around with Affinity Photo than I was with the designs.

In the year leading up to this redesign, I had been spending an increasing amount of time in front of a computer for my day job. I had changed my wallpaper to a grayscale image which seemed to reduce distractions. Finally I just turned color off on my computer altogether. Back to black and white!

As I was ruminating on what to do next, several ideas began to coalesce into a new approach. This site was changing its focus from the past iterations. My patience had been wearing thin with the excessive advertising, tracking, graphics, pop-ups, animations and “tech for the sake of tech” prevailing on so many sites these days. I had become especially irked with sites that seemed to be designed for iPhone first but didn’t translate to the desktop so well. I wanted a site that loaded fast, and looked good on all screens (as much as possible); but most importantly one that would get you the info you wanted to see without having to sign in, or dodge multiple overlays warning you about cookies.

I also remembered an article I read years ago concerning the problems with archiving digital files. One point the article brought up was that paper is in many ways a more durable archival format since you don’t need to rely on technology to read a book. I still have the print copy of this article, by the way.

Finally, this site’s specific focus has changed from trying to sell records, to telling the story of Stanton Park, and being a place where I can write about other related (or not) topics. Thus designing it to emulate the by-gone days of print seemed to be an interesting concept.

Since this site is more history than breaking story, using the paradigm of a book might have been a good concept. However, for some reason, I kept coming back to the idea of a newspaper, and that is the design I wound up going with. Don’t forget to turn the page.

While I have tried to make this site accessible as possible to all browsers and devices, it is best viewed on a large screen with a relatively recent browser. No plug-ins are necessary to view the site. However, if you’re using an older computer or very old browser, you might have problems with the audio files. (See what I am talking about?)

How this Site was Created

Some of you may remember the web in its infancy, before fancy animation, before Flash, before database-driven pages and before sites that take forever to load and link to multiple external libraries to enable them to run. The web may not have been pretty, but it could be fast (given a good internet connection). Over the years I have been involved with a good deal of web page developement and have seen many trends come and go. Many good ideas and improvements have come to the web. But there have been many ideas which I find to be solutions in search of a problem. For instance, how many Javascript frameworks do we really need? And why does it seem there’s a new one every month?

Several years ago I got tired of trying to keep up with the technology when I should have really been concentrating on the content. So with this iteration of the Stanton Park site, I scaled down the technology to utilize html and css for the page layout along with a very little bit of Javascript. To allow me to add pages to the site without having to edit every page, I employed few small Perl scripts.

Instead of a lot of plug-ins, or libraries, I have taken a lot of time to get up to date with html and especially css. Both have come a long way since I put my first web page together back in the mid-nineties. One of the welcome advancements in web technology in the past ten years has been the advent of web font technology. And this is something I am taking advantage of on this site. Below is a list of the fonts used on this site. All of the fonts are available for use under the SIL license.

While I still remain comitted to the Macintosh platform (hey, it’s my day job!), I have been doing all my coding in a Linux vm on an iMac. If it matters, (well, it doesn’t really) I have been using the Manjaro distribution for the past few years, which runs beautifully in a vm and even better installed natively on a Macbook Pro. In keeping with my “back to the basics” approach with the code, I have switched to using Emacs to write all these words and code. Although css has eliminated the need for many of the supporting graphic files, photos still need to be edited and resized. Affinity Photo is an astonishingly good photo editor, and the price is even more astounding.

Using the Keyboard

Many of us started off using computers by having a mouse peform nearly all tasks. These days on laptops, you probably do not have a mouse attached, but will use the trackpad or even keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes the trackpad isn’t so good, which can be annoying when trying to move the mouse to a certain place on the screen. For me, I have made a conscious attempt to use keyboard shortcuts as often as possible. Alas on the web, keyboard shortcuts to navigate sites are far from universal, rather difficult to enable for all browsers and certainly not consistent (or documented!) from site to site where they exist.

Even with all that in mind, I have implemented a few shortcuts for this site which are documented on this page (or type the ? key) if you are interested in trying them out. But halfway through building this site I had a brainstorm. Just type H and see what happens…