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: Me, Myself and I

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. Largely because I'm not really that remarkable and so I just don't explain who I am all that much. But if you must know something; I grew up on the outskirts of London and now live in the South East of England, I've been playing video games since I was 4, been into computers since I was 6, have been chronically online since I was 10, and have spent the best part of 30 years trying to find more intuitive ways to waste my own time.

I do have a day job, but unless you do some detective work on one of my socials you'd never guess what it is (it doesn't involve computers). I also have a fondness for working on my car which is getting on a bit (though it's not as old as I am). In fact generally speaking I'm more of a jack of all trades and a master of none, but as the saying goes, a jack of all trades is often better than a master of one.

Anyway, that's all you're getting out of me on a personal level, but you're more than welcome to have a look at the following social media and netwoking accounts I have if you so desire, to see if you can find out more about me and what I create:

	TikTok
	Instagram	— My profile is currently private.
	X
	YouTube
	GitHub
	Reddit	— I don't really use Reddit except to read posts when they pop up in search results.
	Facebook	— Like Instagram my account is mostly private.

I didn't used to have much of an online presence anywhere on the Internet except here and Facebook up until 2017, when I did away with my barely used Facebook account. Then up until fairly recently aside from this site, I didn't have an online presence at all (I didn't really 'do' social media). However that stint ended when I got into the world of TikTok back in 2022 and haven't really looked back since, though even now my accounts are few and far between and largely have bugger all on them or are just outright private.

I do have a different "persona" I tend to use on various gaming platforms but I consider that a separate entity to my public social media "image" and don't intend to share it, which may seem somewhat ironic given I am quite a prolific gamer and often make content about gaming in general on my other socials; but that's just the way I roll!

In the world of increasing social media use; fake accounts, copycats and outright scammers have a habit of trying to pretend to be people. Not that I would likely ever be a target of this (hopefully) given I'm just small-fry and keep myself to myself. But just in case, a general rule of thumb is if you find "my" profile on a website or app that I haven't linked above, then that's not me.

📜 XenoDyne, a Brief History

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.

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 is also pretty much exempt from the UK's Online Safety Act 2023 since it doesn't contain user-generated content or contain anything that would otherwise be considered age-restricted, and while I recommend the site only be viewed by those 18+ that's mainly because I swear like a drunk navvy and have questionable opinions.

❌ XenoDyne Doesn't Allow Comments (Yet, or Probably Ever)

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. I then considered just having a forum instead, and perhaps integrating one into a comment system. This would now be considerably easier since I've switched to Bludit, but this site has never gained much traffic in its years of existence and so then not adding these sorts of features became more about the fact no one would use them. These days, given the UK's draconian Online Safety Act 2023 can potentially apply to websites that have such features I may never implement anything like them.

🔚 There's Not Much Else to Know

Not yet anyway. That's it. Or rather that's all I can be bothered to write.