About on Much Ado About IT

Search

Julian Knight — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Search this site using Google Site Search.
Note that targeted advertising is turned **off** for greater privacy.

Getting in Touch

Julian Knight — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Secure Contact Form - Successful Submission

Julian Knight — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for contacting me.

I will do my best to get back to you in the next couple of days.

With regards, Julian Knight

Privacy Policy & Disclosure

Julian Knight — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:04:46 +0000

Privacy Policy for it.knightnet.org.uk

This privacy policy is valid from 1 April 2018.

If you require any more information or have any questions about this privacy policy, please feel free to contact us via the contact form. You can also contact Julian Knight via Twitter (@knightnet).

At it.knightnet.org.uk, the privacy and security of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by it.knightnet.org.uk and how it is used.

Analytics

This site uses the basic Google Analytics service for tracking how useful people are finding the articles and information. Please see the Google Analytics terms and conditions for details.

it.knightnet.org.uk uses Google and Bing analytics to track page usage. This is only used so that I can optimise the site and ensure that I provide useful content.

Google Analytics sets a number of non-personally identifiable secure cookies. You may delete these at any time, it will not impact your use of this site.

Cookies

it.knightnet.org.uk is driven by Hugo. This is a static site generator that doesn’t use any tracking.

The site is currently hosted at Netlify, this hosting service does not add cookies or tracking beacons but may maintain access logs. Please see the Netlify Privacy Policy for details.

Cookies are not generally used for any tracking of guests on this site. However, it.knightnet.org.uk reserves the right to include advertising at some future point which may require its own cookies. In this case, this privacy policy will be updated to show which cookies are in use and why. Advertising and paid content will always be clearly identified.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers’ respective websites.

Tracking Graphics (Web Beacons)

it.knightnet.org.uk should not be using any tracking graphics. However, there may be some graphics that appear similar to tracking ones.

If you find any tracking graphics on any page of this site, please contact us so that we can fix the problem straight away thanks.

Comments System

This site uses Disqus for its comments system. Please see the Disqus Privacy Policy for details. As Disqus is used on many sites, it is possible that they may have the ability to track your use across sites.

Disqus is set to not perform any personally identifiable tracking or targeted advertising.

Disclosure

This disclosure policy is valid from 22 April 2018

This blog is a personal blog owned, written and edited by Julian Knight. For issues with or questions about this blog, please contact me via the contact form on this site. You can also contact me via Twitter (@knightnet).

This blog does not currently accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. We write for our own purposes. However, we may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

Should any compensation be accepted in the future, it will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. Any advertisements will be clearly identified as paid advertisements.

The owner of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

This disclosure policy is based on the templates provided by:

Design for this Blog

Julian Knight — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:25:59 +0000

Outlines key design elements, things left to do and testing links.

Basic Site Design for Much Ado About IT

This blog is a convenient place for me to dump thoughts, ideas, moans, etc. related to Information Management (IM, IMT) and Information Technology (IT). It will also occasionally get postings about other subjects mainly, at least vaguely related to technology and information but sometimes about politics, religion and other musings. These may include subjects such as censorship, so called “intellectual property”, patents, copyrights, etc.

The site has gone through several redesigns over the years.

Originally it brought together some previous sites using Wordpress on Dreamhost. That was too slow and I moved to my own VPS. However, WordPress is just to hard both to maintain and to secure. Also, I really didn’t need much of what WordPress actually does and it always ended up being really slow no matter what I did to try and improve things.

So I ultimately took the plunge and migrated to a Static Site Generator. Initially using Jekyll and GitHub pages but that proved a lot less than satisfactory. Then I stumbled upon Hugo & Netlify with a little extra help from Cloudflare. That seems an almost perfect combination for a blog style site - or indeed many other types too.

So the site is now super-fast, it is privacy-minded as I don’t use any trackers and it is secure, following best practices for web security as well as being rebuilt from secure source-code on each update.

In terms of the look, I borrowed from WordPress’s Twenty-Sixteen and Twenty-Eleven themes and created my own Hugo Theme from scratch.

Key features of my theme

Simple, clean layout.
Split into general blog posts and specific knowledgebase articles.
Header image (my own photo).
Uses Bulma.css for styling.
Accessible design. Lighthouse audit: Home page 100%, Example page 93% (reading time is low contrast)
Simple, clean, common site menu (Generated automatically by Hugo and Styled using Bulma.CSS).
Shave/Save page icons that don’t leak personal information to 3rd-parties.
Follow-me icons that don’t leak personal information to 3rd-parties.
Extensive micro-format and metadata for every page.
Active JavaScript kept to an absolute minimum.
Google Analytics - limited to non-identifying data only.
Disqus - for user engagement. Can leak some identifying data though I’ve minimised it. I’ve not found anything better than this for ease of engagement.
Simple search - using Google Site Search. This needs replacing really - still looking for a workable alternative. Targetted advertising is turned off for enhanced privacy.

Features from Hugo

Auto-generated menu.
Auto-generated category & tag lists.
Auto-generated Knowledgebase sections.
Uses custom theme.
Uses asset feature allowing minimising and merging of css/js assets.
Auto-generated Google sitemap.
Auto-generated feed.rss.
Auto-generated indexes of categories and tags.
Auto-generate related pages indexes for each article/post.

Features from Netlify

Rebuild and automatically redeploy whenever the source repository is updated.
Fix outdated page URL’s using redirects.

Features from Cloudflare

Enhanced page caching.
Protection of web assets.
Denial of Service impact reduction.
Alternative page analytics.
Enhanced TLS.

To Do

Improve look of previous/next paging.
Add default article/post image.
Replace (or add to) default header images with my own, add an auto-rotate - or maybe assign randomly from a set of images on every rebuild.
Find a way to create year/month archive pages - currently no easy way to do this in Hugo.
Add W3C and WAI compliance logos.
Create a better search feature.
For CODE, on hover, expand width for better view (probably need to change z-order too).
Find a way to include lists of backlinks for each page.
Add my Feedly links to “follow me”.

Site Tests

Security Testing

Hardenize.com
SSL Labs - Test Common Security Issues
Scott Helme’s & Sophos security header testing
Pentesting (40 free credits per day)
Mozilla Observatory
Privacy tests

License, Copyright & Usage

Julian Knight — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:46:34 +0000

The nature of a site like this means that it will reference many organisations and products. As such all copyrights and trade marks are acknowledged. If you think or know that any reference requires a specific acknowledgement, please get in touch and I will endeavour to put things right as quickly as possible.

The majority of the information on the site is likely to have come from myself or from other, acknowledged, sources and the copyright of that information is held accordingly. If you wish to use the information in any other publication (whether web, print, or any other media) other than according to the following licenses, please get in touch to ensure that these things are taken care of.

Licenses

Any text written by Julian Knight or other contributing author is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Any images supplied by Julian Knight (specifically the banner images) or any other contributing author are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Any computer language code shared in articles or pages and any code that underpins the delivery of this website is Open Source under the Apache 2 license. You may not used the code except in compliance with the License.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. Please see the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Many thanks for your patience,

Julian Knight.