Site design notes
Graphics
The background pattern used here is an adapted version of a textile design by Shipibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon. These patterns are based on the geometric hallucinations that originate in ayahuasca intoxication, and they play a significant role in Shipibo shamanic healing. More designs can be seen in the gallery.
The image in the header is a detail of Pablo Amaringo’s painting, ‘Caros Divinos’ (“Divine Cars”).
The odd little fellow in the bottom right is a fantastical depiction taken to be a Formorian, one of the first mythical settlers of Ireland.
Standards & accessibility
This site was designed and developed by Gyrus, who works in various guises at Tengai and Norlonto. It’s built using web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The aim is to make it as accessible and usable as possible to as wide an audience as possible.
However, we don’t have as much time as we’d like to devote to this labour-of-love site, and some compromises have been made. You will find that the older your browser, the less likely you will have access to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that control the site’s layout and design. We should stress that while this means the site won’t look very pretty to users of older browsers, theoretically everyone will still have access to the site’s content. In fact, more people (e.g. those using non-standard devices like PDAs) should have access to it than with the old tables-based design.
There may be various quirks in the design even in more recent browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.
Those using older browsers that either do not receive our CSS or have problems with it are encouraged to upgrade if at all possible. We recommend:
- Mozilla Firefox or Netscape 7+
- Opera 7+
- Internet Explorer 6+ (Windows)
- Safari (Mac OS X)
- Konqueror (Linux)
Any comments, or reports of technical difficulties accessing the site, are welcome.