About

If you're here then you probably want to know a bit more about this website, the one and only author, owner and webmaster known as Xan, and… Well, stuff related to all of that. Either that or you clicked the wrong link and are already pressing the back button. Still here? Oh good. Well then allow me to provide some brief background information on XenoDyne and myself (and it's not going to be particularly in-depth).

Xan & XenoDyne, a Brief History

I am Xan (pronounced 'szan', Not 'eks-an' as so many people incorrectly think) and I am a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That's all you’re getting.

I came up with the name XenoDyne because I thought it was clever and unique: Xeno is Greek for stranger, Dyne also originates from Greek and is a unit of force. Put them together and you (kind of) have 'Strange Force'. I've always considered myself a bit of a strange force of nature to be honest so the fancy name seems to do myself justice.

I didn't used to have an online presence anywhere on the Internet except here. I didn't 'do' social media until recently, and even now my accounts are few and far between and largely have bugger all on them or are just outright private. I am on X (or Twitter as it was once known), but as myself (Xan), not XenoDyne. There is some cunt on X/Twitter who uses 'Xenodyne' as their handle and claims to be an aspiring indie game developer, but they created that account two years before I even registered this domain, so no, it isn't me.

Meanwhile XenoDyne itself has been through a few iterations. It was largely unused for a few years until I finally decided to start a blog and installed an at the time relatively new CMS called Ghost, which was and probably still is horrendously difficult to setup and run and is just generally unnecessarily overcomplicated. I ended up ditching it in favour of my own HTML5 creation, but after a year and a half or so of that I went back to Ghost which was still a bit of a bollock to install and keep running but had matured enough for it to be somewhat easier to operate and update.

A few years later the Ghost developers made some quiet changes in the background that meant newer versions stopped working on my host completely, and despite my polite requests for help they ignored me and acted like a bunch of arrogant pricks, so I ditched Ghost and moved to this thing I use now, which might not be as feature rich but it's considerably easier to install, run and use and takes up a fraction of the resources, oh and it isn’t developed by a bunch of absolute arsehats either.

Oh well, that's basically it. Nothing too interesting I know but it's a website on the Internet in amongst billions of other websites, so what did you expect?

XenoDyne Uses Google AdSense

Yes, I display Adsense ads on this site. They may appear in the middle of articles but they shouldn't be obtrusive; not that I've ever seen them. As much as I enjoy being a webmaster, this shit costs money and I'd quite like my articles to be considered worth at least something if they helped anyone out there, so show a little sympathy. Besides, I won't ever go as far as some site admins do and implement a nag screen when it detects an ad-blocker or, beg for donations or subscriptions. I'm not a complete and total cunt.

The only issue is with recent changes to Google's Adsense in the UK & European Economic Area spurred on by GDPR laws, they now require that people that visit this site from inside those areas are shown a GDPR consent notice, which you may have already seen if your adblock software is shit enough (or doesn't even exist). Although as you can see from XenoDyne's privacy policy (linked below), we don't actually set any cookies that collect data or track you or do any other kind of data collection or tracking, beyond the usual IP address and hostname logging on the server (which is pretty standard practice for any webserver) and session management.

As such the consent form is purely there due to Google's nefarious data collecting practices that they employ as a result of the ads shown, but at least now you can remove consent directly on XenoDyne whereas before you had to go and do it on Google’s end.

XenoDyne Has a Privacy Policy

As mentioned above, and here it is. It's pretty short & sweet: I personally don't collect any information about you at all on the site. At most, your IP or hostname and what pages you've accessed is recorded by the server, but not for any reason beyond statistics and those logs are not provided to any third parties.

XenoDyne Doesn't Allow Comments (Yet)

Originally, this was mostly because I couldn't be bothered to figure out a way to implement a decent comment system to add to the site when it was using the aforementioned CMS called Ghost. This would now be considerably easier since I've switched to Bludit, but it's something for the back burner still as I really don't feel XenoDyne has the kind of traffic that would warrant opening up articles for comments.

There's Not Much Else to Know

Not yet anyway.

That's it. Or rather that's all I can be bothered to write.