What are cookies
Cookies are small files that get put on your computer by
websites as you surf them. These cookies can store lots of
information which can have privacy implications. We like to
think all the cookies used on this site are fairly innocuous but
that's for you to judge.
Anonymous tracking software
We use Google Analytics (just like virtually everybody else) a
service provided by Google. They gather anonymous data of how
people are using this site and then provide us with visitor
statistics, details of page views etc etc. You can think of
it as being a bit like CCTV but one that automatically blurs your
face so we can see what people have done, but not who. If you
are anti-Google you can opt-out of being tracked by Google
Analytics at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
(we'd prefer you didn't though as this data is seriously helpful to
us in improving our website)
Site widgets
There are many great widgets and badges available for websites
these days - anything from Twitter or Facebook buttons to software
that power's blog comments. Sadly most of these come with
cookies - that's the "price of free". So hand's up, there are
more third parties tracking data on this site than we would like
and each of them are setting cookies as you surf this site.
They are: AddThis, Facebook, Twitter.
We are working hard to work out what they all do but we are
pretty confident that they all collect data anonymously unless you
are already logged into their service. They probably just
collect details of pages visited, anonymise it, aggregate it with
several thousand or million others people's anonymous data and then
look at pretty graphs. In many cases the cookies are used to
generate identical information to Google Analytics (see above) and
indeed use Google Analytics, so opting-out of Google Analytics will
also opt you out of these cookies too. We are working to find out
more about each of the cookies used.
Don't want any cookies ever?
While we'd love to offer a cookie-free version of our site we
are a small company and simply don't have the resources to provide
and maintain one. Unfortunately if you are really anti-cookie
then there is no option except to not use our site. You can
remove any cookies we have already put on your machine within your
browser settings - pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete may
work in many cases. We will be sorry to see you go!