1: How do I get rid of these Background Graphics?
Don’t you like them? I’m sorry about that, but there is no longer an option to remove them.
I was faced with some technical difficulties, and after some consideration I decided the simplest (and easiest!) solution was to make them non-optional. With the vast majority of readers likely to have plenty of Internet bandwidth at their disposal, and as I recently re-styled the website to be easier to read (by darkening the graphics), I don’t believe this will be a problem.
For those interested in the technicalities, click the footnote to open it.
Some website updates “broke” the mechanism I was using to act on a user’s preference, which was to append a query string to every clickable link. In particular, trying to use anchor strings as well as query strings within a URL did not parse as expected.
I was faced with a choice: spend some time debugging and repairing the javascript; go for a new method which has become available since I originally designed this website (localStorage) to save a token rather than use a query string; or just kill it off.
I toyed with the idea of a localStorage token, but actually localStorage is very similar to cookies – it stores persistent data on a user’s computer, so to be strictly GDPR-compliant I would also have to implement a permissions mechanism. Even more work!
So then I went back (in my mind, that is) to the idea of debugging the javascript. Until I decided to simply take it out.