About Caravanning Now.

Everything you wanted to know (and probably some stuff you don't need to know).

About me.

My name is Richard Cole and I'm a retired software developer.
My wife and I caravanned for over 30 years before I decided that I wasn't enjoying the towing part of caravanning any more (in 2006) and a change of car settled that, so we sold the caravan and all of our parts for it.

I decided that I would carry on maintaining and updating Caravanning Now while my caravanning knowledge isn't (too far) out of date.

My personal web site is here and with my local (Dorset) photos are here.

Site History.

A site of caravanning frequently asked questions (FAQs) was originally started by me in response to constantly seeing the same questions being asked, time and time again, on the usenet news group uk.rec.caravanning and the people having to dig out the same old replies over and over again. These could be quite long and cause the usenet's download size to increase enormously (this was in the days before broadband when it was a dial-up connection).
That was back in 1995 (or there-about's) when I set it up in a sub-domain under by personal web pages on Demon.
After that it was simply a matter of pointing a link to the appropriate URL.

In 2003 I registered the caravanninnow.co.uk domain name and shortly afterwards transferred the web pages from Demon to my current hosting company (1 & 1) where it now lives and has been refreshed and rebuilt several times since.

The various pages are now updated as and when new information is obtained from site visitors and my various sources (and a very big thank you to all of my sources). Things such as new caravan breakers, changes of club email addresses, etc.

Liability.

All information is provided 'as is'. It's up to you to make sensible use of it.

In other words if you break it because of something that you read here then don't come crying to me or to the quoted author.
I have no control over the content of any web site that may be included as a link.

Paying for it all.

At the moment income from the advertisers just about covers the hosting costs and I'm happy for this situation to continue, so that the site is free for all to use. Please feel free to click on the links to Amazon or the Google ads, it all helps.

Any links to external sites from within the text (i.e. on the Breakers, Links and any other page) are there to provide you with information and earn the site no income.

Errors, omissions and corrections:

If there are any errors, omissions or corrections required. Please contact me using the feedback shortcut or by clicking here.

What I do with your feedback.

I read it, try and correct/include/change whatever it is you've requested and then I respond to your feedback to tell you if the change has been made or if it hasn't been made then, why not.
I do tend to keep feedback emails as sometimes I get feedback saying that a particular site or link is now dead, so after testing I will remove that link. If the person it relates to comes back to ask why, I can then reinstate the link and forward on the requesting email to the person erroneously removed.

Quoting / Copying from this site.

If you want to take a chunk of information from this site and put it onto your site or to quote it in full on a forum then please respect the authors copyright and don't just do it. If you do need to take information, to put on a web site then ensure that you acknowledge to whom the copyright belongs and include a link back to this site.
Any infringement of this will receive a 'take-down' request from me and for the period I know the text to be there, there will be a charge of £1 per words per day.

If your posting to a forum please just post a page link to the forum. The forum will appreciate that.

Linking to this site:

If you find this site useful, please add a link to it from your web site.
Please use http://www.caravanningnow.co.uk/index.htm as the link page.
If you do add a link, then please send me a feedback message and I will reciprocate with a link to your site if I can.

Privacy.

What I collect from you when you visit this site.

The site that hosts these web pages, like all web site hosting companies, creates a web log file which contains the same details about you as is collected at every other web site that you visit and (as far as I know) there is nothing that you can do to avoid the data being collected. I don't normally look at these web logs as I tend to use the Google Analytics tools which also collects information (see this Wikipedia page for more information).
The hosting company's log file will collect the following information from you:

NOTE: The web log file information is effectively anonymous as it stores no information that can be regarded as personal (no user name, user id, address, contact information, etc). You can find out far more about me using various legitimate web tools like WhoIs than I can about you from the log files.

The IP address that you are connecting from. (This is most likely a temporary IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider [ISP] each time you connect - In some cases this may be always the same IP address if you are on a fixed IP address). Your IP address is not considered as personal data under the Data Protection Act.

The date and time of your visit.

The name of every page that you visit and the parts of that page (images / style sheets / etc.) that are downloaded to your computer in order that your computer can display the page.

Any errors that occurred during your visit to this site. (Page not found; Server errors; etc.).

How much data was transferred to your computer and how long that took.

If you came to this site from a link on someone else's web page (say Goggle), then it records the name of the site that you came from and if you used a search engine, it will also display what you were searching on (i.e. "Caravan Breakers").

The operating system and browser type that you are running on your PC.

Some information about your computer (i.e. screen resolution, number of colours, Javascript availability).

What I do with the information.

The information I collect is already depersonalised and I use it to view:

How many visitors the site has had and when they visited so I know when the site is most used (time of day and day of week)

How much data is being transferred from the site each day, in case I need to upgrade my agreement with the company hosting this web site.

How long visitors stay on the site so I can see how well it is being received.

Which pages are the most popular and which pages were not looked at.

Which page visitors enter the site through and which page they leave from, so if people are always abandoning this site on a particular page, I can look at the page and see if it need rewriting to make you want to stay longer.

How visitors navigate through the site, so I can improve the navigation to make popular pages easier to get to.

Any errors that may have occurred during a visit, so that I can fix them if they are broken links to other web sites.

Which browsers and operating systems were used to access the site, so that I can modify the pages to suit the browsers that are most popular.

How many people visit using mobile devices such as mobile phones or PDA's

When the visitor came from a search engine, which search words they used to find this site, so that I can try and improve the web site contents and search engine optimisation (i.e. how near the top it comes when you search), by tweaking the search key words in each page.

How long I keep the information.

If I download the web log files (which I don't do anymore), then Indefinitely (or until I run out of space on my PC).

Google Analytics keeps information since the time I started using it (2008).

What I leave on your computer.

My analytics tool (Google Analytics) will, if you have enabled cookies and you permit cookies from this site, leave cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to record user re-visits as it shows (from the presence of the cookie) that you have been here before.

If you want to block cookies then see www.aboutcookies.org.

If you do decide to block all cookies, then the Caravanning Now site will still work but some other sites (especially shopping sites) may have problems.

The Google Analytics cookies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. Google uses something called the Double click DART cookie. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Any advertisements that appear on the various pages may leave cookies of their own.

If however, you book mark this site as a favourite, then as a part of that process, you will download a small icon image that will show alongside this site when you look in your favourites (site icon).

 
 
<