About The Robin Lane Web Site

History

The Robin Lane Web Site was first created and put up on the World Wide Web in 1994. It was relatively primitive, with white backgrounds, no tables or frames, and little in the way of formatting. The scans were not top quality, and were in GIF format as opposed to the better JPEG format. But it was one of the earliest web sites for a musical artist, and it did include scans of all Robin's album covers (front and back), track listings and a biography.

For a variety of reasons, the web site languished in its original state for a number of years. This was due in part to Robin's temporary absence from the music scene, my no longer being associated with the institute where the web site was hosted, and my general laziness. There was actually a newer version that I was working on, complete with background artwork, frames (a menu on the left with the information filled in on the right), and updated information. This version of the web site was never made public.

The current web site is a redesign, where I have abandoned frames and background pictures and instead went for a more modern look, with each page having a navigation section at the bottom. (Of course I may change the look at any time, but I don't expect to go back to frames.) And I added the message board and more content.

Design and Construction

The web site was designed and constructed by Roy Rubinstein, with some input from Robin Lane (making this the official Robin Lane web site).

It was constructed using text editors, without the aid of any web site construction applications, HTML editors or the like. It uses HTML (obviously) along with JavaScript, PHP and Perl. Many of the bells and whistles will not be noticeable to the typical web surfer, but I put in support for different browsers and different screen resolutions, plus some things to make it easier to manage the site (and to have a little more fun building it). For example the navigation area at the bottom of each page was generated by external JavaScript code, so that I only need to make changes to a single file to affect all the pages. I then rewrote this in PHP to improve performance and to enable the links to be detected by more search engines. (I opted to use PHP for this instead of SSI because it is more powerful, plus my web host has index.php in the DirectoryIndex but not index.shtml. If you don't know what this means, don't worry about it. Unless, of course, you develop web sites in which case you should know about these things.)

Privacy and Security

We take your privacy very seriously at this web site. It does not use cookies, beacons or any other method to monitor your activity. The same is true for the mailing list.

The only time personal information is collected is when you post a message on the message board or send me email. I may also collect some additional information (such as connection IP addresses and access times) to monitor the web site. I do not share this information with anyone else (except perhaps band members) and do not sell or distribute the mailing list.

The information you post on the message board is clearly public, and I have no control over what anyone does with that. I also cannot make any claims about the security of the web site host or my ISP, or what information they may gather. And unencrypted email on the Internet is inherently insecure. But I will keep your private information private on my end.

Also, just to clarify something that has come up, I will not put you on the mailing list unless I am specifically requested to do so. Posting a message on the message board or simply sending me an email message about Robin will not automatically put you on the mailing list. This strict "opt-in" policy has been made so that the mailing list will not be the source of any unwanted email. If you do wish to be put on the mailing list, you can do so here.

Linking to the Site

You are welcome (and encouraged) to link to this site. I recommend, however, that you only link to the main page (http://www.randomrogue/robinlane/) to ensure that the link will not "break" if I move or rename files (as I recently did when I started using PHP). Also, be careful not to capitalize any letters in the web site address, as that may cause problems.

Stuff To Do

Of course there is always more to do. Here are some of the things I'm planning:

• more Q & A in the FAQ
• more pictures
• audio samples
• more interviews and articles
• icons instead of words in the navigation bar
• lyrics
• perhaps some different background colors and/or images

If you have any reasonable suggestions or additional information, please contact me.

Disclaimer

The information here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. No warrantees are expressed or implied. I take no responsibility for any inaccuracies, accidental or intentional, or anything else I may say or do.