The Author
The site publishes the works of Albert Semple — a Scotsman born in Ayrshire in 1980.
Copyright
Albert Semple is identified as the author of all works published on this site for the purposes of copyright, including poetry, rhyming dictionary entries, format/presentation and search algorithm. All rights are reserved. To seek permission to reuse any content on this site please contact [email protected]
Privacy
This site does not collect any personal information. It does not use cookies. With the exception of the Twitter Emulator, pages do not use javascript for essential functionality (i.e. if JavaScript is disabled, the site will continue to function). There's no nefarious tracking hidden here, no ads, no assets or scripts from other domains that could inject tracking. Just a simple, safe, static website.
Accessibility
This site aims to be accessible to the maximum number of readers who may use the site in different ways.
Firstly, visitors to the web page are presented with a clean layout, including right-justified line numbers on the 1st and every 5th line, as is the convention for printed poetry. This site is rendered in one of two high contrast colour schemes, depending on the dark-scheme preference the user has set on their device. The content flows responsively to accomodate different screensizes, with content wrapping rather than requiring users to scroll horizontally. Where content is wrapped, continuation lines have a double em-space indent, to distinguish them from poetry lines that are intentionally indented, where a single em-space is used. Continuation lines do not count towards the line count, as is the convention for printed poetry.
Secondly, visitors who use a screen reader are given a clean read-through of the poem content without the line numbers.
Thirdly, some users may wish to print poems for reading/sharing offline. The poem pages have each been optimised and tested for printing, ensuring the redundant navigation controls are hidden when poetry pages are printed.
And finally, some users may choose to copy and paste poems, or extracts from poems (subject to the Fair Use provision within UK Copyright law), and share the plain text, for example, on social media platforms or for use in literary criticism. This has also been tested to ensure that the plain text is readable, including horizontal lines between sections (presented as a batch of underscores in plain text) and no line numbers. If the poem text is pasted into a rich text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook email composer) then the poems are presented as a numbered list detailing the line number on every line.
Status of Texts
These works, including the dictionary, may still be in progress, with changes being made from time-to-time, but the latest version is always available here.
Site Technology
This site is published via Cloudflare as a static HTML site, ensuring security, speedy loading and accessibility. A proprietary static site generator has been written to build this site when changes are made, and this build process has been automated via GitHub. The generator utilises a *.poem extension markdown file format which allows us to easily maintain poetry as plain text files that can be ingested by the generator and transformed into the formatted HTML presented on this site. For further information on the static site generator please contact [email protected]