What you need for the site, and how to get the best from your visit:

about me and this website

Finding your way around the site

Navigation between pages on this site can be done in more than one way. Firstly, the top menu gives you a quick link to the upper hierarchy of topics: travel, online privacy, music, cannabis and the catchall "More..." category. Although a click on any button on the green bar here will take you to the main page in that topic, each button with a tiny arrow on the right is also expandable downwards. The full menu of site offerings is available from these drop-down sections. It's a fairly standard navigation system, but it does need JavaScript running in your browser to be able to use it. Most pages also have a "Jump to another zone:" drop-down menu at the bottom of the content, with a more summary selection of choices:


Just click on the arrow next to the menu, then click "Go!" to navigate to that page. Finally, some zones spread over more than one page (the online and gallery zones are two examples of zones which do this) and have extra drop-down menus which let you  navigate within the zone itself. It probably sounds a lot more complicated than it is - just click around and you'll find your way. Should you want a simplified overview of the site to see what's on offer, take a look at the site map in the helpfully-named site-map zone.

Information about the pictures in the photo gallery is given as a tooltip - hover your mouse pointer over the banner to see details of where and how the photos were taken:

Cookie Policy

Cookies are small text files placed on your computer by websites. They may provide useful information to the originating site. For you, it means you can use a site more efficiently and save time by not having to re-enter your details each time you visit. In general, there are three types of cookies on websites:

• Session cookies which expire when you leave a site.


• Persistent cookies that remain in place across multiple visits to sites.


• Third-party cookies, used by business partners of a site.

Some of these cookies are essential and some are optional.

This site uses third-party cookies from Statcounter.com purely for measuring visitor numbers and ranking the popularity of content. It is perfectly possible to view and interact with all content on the tokezone without accepting any Statcounter cookies. This is an extract from Statcounter's Privacy Policy:

"StatCounter.com respects the privacy and rights of its visitors. No effort is made to identify individuals without their knowledge. Personally identifiable information such as visitor's name, telephone number, postal address and email address are technically impossible for StatCounter to collect and no attempt is made to do so. The information that is recorded consists of the date and time of visit, ip address, browser (e.g. Firefox 3.5), operating system version (e.g. Windows XP), screen resolution (e.g. 800x600), referring link, the current page url and the current page title. This information is collected solely to improve the service we offer to you and statistical purposes and is not used to identify individuals."

Other than this, the site sets session cookies, which it is necessary to accept in order to participate in the survey and persistent cookies, for the quick poll or when you rate a topic. You’ll find more information about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org

Browsers and screen resolution

The tokezone supports "any damn browser." The site has been tested on five different browsers in Windows - Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chromium/Chrome and SeaMonkey. I'll just run the version numbers past you in case they are important: IE 7 8 and 9, Opera 10, 11 and 12, Firefox 13, Chromium 21 and SeaMonkey 2x. It also looks quite good on Firefox 13, Chromium 13 and Rekong 0.9 in Linux, and is fully functional for navigation and site searching running from that OS. There are plenty of (seemingly-contented) visitors to the site who use Safari, so there should be no problem there as Rekong is a Web-Kit browser.

IE and most other browsers shows the rollover colours and buttons correctly; only IE, Opera and Rekong (of the browsers I've tested the site with) show the top menu with its unfold animation. (When I say IE, I mean both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and browsers such as Maxthon and Avant Browser which use Internet Explorer as the rendering engine.)

Although 800 x 600 screen resolution will work on the tokezone, 1024 x 768 will mean freedom from horizontal scrolling on all the pages. Only around 5% of site visitors have monitors with an 800x600 pixel resolution anyway, a figure set to drop further as older CRT monitors are replaced. High colour (thousands of colours) is OK for the photo gallery, and you'll probably get by with 256 colours on the rest of the site, although it will look rather grainy.

The site is not designed for browsing with internet-enabled phones, nor do I have any plans to offer pages optimised for mobiles in the future. It's computer (desktop, laptop, netbook) pages only here, sorry.

The "Send to a friend" page

A way to let people know about the page you saw here is to use the "Send this page to a friend" button. Clicking on this allows you to send an email to a single friend (including perhaps a short, personal message) with a link from the page you just visited. This is a faster and simpler way if you want to notify just one person about the page. Any email addresses you enter on the form will remain private - this site is a spam-free zone!


The "Quick Poll"

This is a two-click voting system which appears on many pages. There is more than one active Quick Poll question at any one time, and past polls which are closed. To reach other active poll questions click on the Next poll >> link:

When you vote in the Quick Poll, your IP address is recorded to prevent multiple votes in the same question (you can vote again in another Quick Poll question). These votes and IPs are never correlated, so your voting choice remains anonymous and private. You can see archived (and hence closed) polls in a popup when you click the View past polls link. It's about as simple as I could make it!


Downloads and formats

You can download documents from this site in Microsoft Word (doc), Adobe Acrobat (pdf), electronic publishing (ePub) and Microsoft compiled HTML help (chm) formats. The doc format is probably most suited to those running Windows computers, although you may have a compatible word-processing program such as Open Office which will read this proprietary Microsoft format in Linux or Macintosh. Adobe Acrobat's pdf is a universal format for documents, so irrespective of your operating system (Windows, Linux, Macintosh) you'll almost certainly find something on your computer to read it with.

The chm format is less universal, but still multi-platform. It is suitable for reading on your desktop, laptop or pocket computer, and is also readable by most tablet PCs and e-book readers. The full text is searchable. Windows users will already have an embedded help system from Microsoft for reading chm files, while the Firefox browser can read chm files with a simple add-on. Macintosh users have a choice of the open-source Chamonix for OS X or Chmox - both free.

A newer form of document format is the ePub book. This is intended mostly for reading on mobile devices, although there are some free programs which will be useful if you want to view an ePub text on a fixed computer. There will be a suitable ePub reader for a device running on a Windows, Macintosh, Linux or Android machine.

If you are having problems with the downloads, don't right-click on the link - the download link works indirectly through a script which loads your file. Don't use a download accelerator. Try downloading with a different browser or from another location (different ISP).


Javascript on the site

Many features will be unavailable to you here if you visit us with a browser that has Javascript turned off. You won't have access to the search box, nor will the top menu be visible. Downloads will be problematic. On the cafeKlysm sub-site, you see a page that looks like a modern art superimposition of text and graphics. Turning on Javascript is no security risk on this site, we are a friendly place. Add us to your "NoScript" whitelist, or find out how to turn on Javascripting here for various browsers.


Copyright

Content on this site is available for use under the Creative Commons non-derivative, non-commercial use with attribution licence. This means you can use the resources (pictures, text, downloaded files) here as long as you don't change them in any way, that you don't use them for commercial gain, and that you acknowledge this site as the source if you distribute them or post them on your own site or an Internet forum. If you want to copy the material here to somewhere else on the Internet, you must present it unmodified (quoting text verbatim, displaying pictures unchanged, offering files unaltered), not change any of the links within it, and you must provide a link back to the tokezone. Generally, a link to the site is the preferred way of offering your visitors a view of what's here - I update some information very regularly, and you wouldn't want to be quoting older material, nor would I like that to happen. For more information about the Creative Commons licence, click the button below.


 

Advertising

Aside from an occasional, obligatory "powered by..." notice at the bottom of some pages, this site is free of advertising. I pay for the costs of hosting the pages on the tokezone and for the domain name tokezone.net myself and ask for no donations to support them.

General issues

The "site news" feature launched from the front page works by launching a popup window. If you have an ad-blocker running on your system, you may not see it (try it now). I have retained the "news" feature as a regular page (accessed through the drop-down menu at the bottom of each major site page, and containing more information, such as site visitor statistics) to help such visitors.

Today's date is shown at the top of the column on the homepage; if it's wrong, don't blame me. The information comes from the date set on your own computer, read by a simple JavaScript then outputted as text to that place. So try and fix your computer's date and time using the Control Panel first!

Multimedia content (music on the toke-cards, video and audio clips) need the appropriate plug-in for your browser. The Firefox browser in particular can be fiddly when trying to configure a plug-in for the e-cards' music. Opera and IE nearly always play these cards without problem. You will need to have the Flash player and QuickTime player installed as an absolute minimum - if they are not detected, you should get a message of where to download from on the page in question.

I've tried to minimise my use of Flash (see my rant if you want more); in fact it serves simply as window dressing. Site search is implemented through a search engine loaded at the server, so nothing needs to be downloaded to your computer before you can begin searches. The search engine has more options available for in-depth searching across the 800+ pages of this site. You can access these (and advice for successful searches) by clicking "Advanced Search" on the homepage, or through More... Site Search using the top menu on any page. This search tool searches the entire site except for the travel and cafeKlysm FAQ pages. To search those places, type your search term into the small box at the top-right corner of the FAQ pages and hit <enter>.

Problems getting the download to load? Remember to LEFT click on the download link. 

Use the main site URL and you will always reach the site, or search for "tokezone" on any search engine. It's probably easiest to bookmark the tokezone home page here and now:

I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions about the site, so if you have a comment, please contact me here.
 

Compact rant:

Far too many sites which I visit are difficult to use. They require that I enable Javascript in my browser simply to go to another page, or click on a Macromedia Flash menu, or they try to launch photos or text in a tiny, popup window. All of these things could have been done with static html, but the attractions of complexity and pizzazz won the webmaster over, resulting in less usability for the average visitor. Certainly, Flash can perform wonderfully captivating magic on a website, and if the site presents itself as "art" then there's no reason it shouldn't sacrifice a little functionality to such style. However, a website where visitors simply want to obtain information and move on has no excuse for being obscure and overly zippy. Visitors who have Javascript disabled at the browser level in order to block advertisements and popup windows will probably never be able to access those sites which have their navigation functions controlled exclusively by JavaScript.

If Javascript is a mixed blessing, Flash is even more so. Both JS and Flash can be (and have been) used to launch attacks on the host computer, and Flash plugins require regular updating to stay ahead of current exploits. There was no update notification service for older versions of Flash (unlike, let's say, Firefox, or the Microsoft operating systems) so many users run their browsers with an outdated Flash Active-X control as full of holes as Swiss cheese and unaware of the risks they may face.

Even with the 2009 menu changes, you'll still be able to navigate the tokezone entirely using a browser which has Javascripting disabled (with the bottom, drop-down menu), although you won't be able to do things such as searching the site, sending ecards or downloading files.