Online at Last

Online at Last

The new web site is finally done

Posted by Molly on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 00:12:17 (GMT -5)

The “Grackle 2.0” web site is finally ready to go online! I’m sorry that it has taken so long; it has been a hectic summer, and things took a lot longer than I originally anticipated. Hopefully it will prove to have been worth the wait.

Be sure to check out the community sketchbook (the biggest feature of the new design)! Once you register, you can participate in our collaborative online books (or just have fun posting random images and art).

If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or other feedback (good or bad), please let me know! (You can find a link to my email address on the about page.) [H•G]

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Google Analytics
Our site uses Google Analytics to help us learn things about traffic and visitors to our site (for example, what web browsers are most popular, what sites are linking to us, whether we get more traffic on certain days of the week, etc.). To do this, Google Analytics collects various information from your browser, and stores data in a cookie. (Note that Google Analytics does not collect personal data such as your name, email address, or other private information.)

We make use of this information to try to improve the site for you (for example, ensuring that it works on all of the browsers that our visitors use). While we might share some general information (for example, we might write a journal entry discussing which web browsers seem to be most popular, or note if we have received a lot of visitors from a particular state or other region), we do not share any specifically identifying information (such as ISPs or IPs) with others, and we do not ever provide access to our actual Google Analytics data or logins.

Google AdSense
Some of our pages might include Google AdSense advertisements. If present, such advertisements will be clearly labelled as such. The content of such ads is provided by Google, not by us; and they may employ cookies, such as the DoubleClick “DART” cookie, to collect and track information about your visits and clicks (both on our web site and others).

This information is maintained by Google; we have no access to it. You can learn more about this, and opt out of certain features, by visiting Google’s advertising privacy policy.

Community Sketchbooks
If you choose to register as a member of our Community Sketchbook system, we will collect specific, personally identifying information that you provide. Specifically, we ask for your “real” name (or at least, what you want people to know you by online), your email address, your birth date, and a web site that you consider to be your “home page” or other personal place online. We also associate an Artist ID (a login name) and a password with your account.

These things are used to provide a collaborative art sharing system on our site. Some items (your name, birthdate [not including the year], and your home page URL) are displayed to others on the site, to help identify your work in a personal way. Your email address and password are used only for administrative purposes and are never shared with others. If someone requests a new account with your existing artist ID, we will tell that user that the name is already in use; but apart from that, artist IDs will not be generally disclosed.

Note in particular that we do not use your email address for anything except to contact you regarding your account (to let you know when it is activated, or in situations such as if you have forgotten your password). We do not send spam, and we definitely don’t share your email address with anyone.

Please note, however, that while we store your account data in a database that is believed to be secure, we cannot guarantee it; and in any event, our site does not employ SSL or other encryption. Therefore, while we will do our best to protect your data, you would be wise to not use a login or password that you already use elsewhere. (This is a good policy in any situation, really.)

Posts and Comments
Whenever you post a comment or sketchbook submission, we log your IP and the time at which the entry was made, for administrative purposes (for example, to establish if a specific IP is spamming us with bogus comments). The IP is normally only visible to administrators; the time of a post is usually made available to all visitors.

If you have a community sketchbook account, we also keep a count of how many times you have posted to the sketchbooks. These counts will be associated with your artist ID, and will be visible to the public.

We also do, of course, provide public access to the comments and images that you post. That is kind of the point of those features. However, we explicitly reject any claim to copyright to your materials; we will share them here, but you still own the things that you create. (Please don’t post things that you do not own or have rights to post, though!)

Shopping and Purchases
If you purchase items from us through our web site, we will use PayPal for the order processing and billing. Please refer to their privacy policy to learn about their service. We may retain offline records of sales, for tax purposes and inventory tracking. None of your personal information is stored by us online (beyond any sales notices that PayPal might email to us), and we do not ever have access to any of your personal account or billing information. (Only PayPal has that information.)

Other Information
We track the number of times each page, article, or other resource is accessed (“hit counting”). This is done simply by incrementing a counter each time a given page or resource is requested from the server; we do not track visitors’ IPs or use any cookies for this.

If a police, judicial, or other legal request or requirement demands disclosure of private information, we will comply; the Law will of course take precedence over any statements in these (non-legally-binding) guidelines.

If you have any questions or concerns about any of this, please send us an email, and we will do our best to help clear things up.