As is common practice with almost all professional websites this site uses cookies to improve your experience and to make this site work properly. This page describes what information they gather, how we use it and why we sometimes need to store these cookies. We will also share how you can prevent these cookies from being stored however this may downgrade or ‘break’ certain elements of the sites functionality.

 

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language and other display preferences) over a period of time, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.

 

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below.

If you create an account with us then we will use cookies for the management of the signup process and general administration. These cookies will usually be deleted when you log out however in some cases they may remain afterwards to remember your site preferences when logged out.

We use cookies when you are logged in so that we can remember this fact. This prevents you from having to log in every single time you visit a new page. These cookies are typically removed or cleared when you log out to ensure that you can only access restricted features and areas when logged in.

This site offers newsletter or email subscription services and cookies may be used to remember if you are already registered and whether to show certain notifications which might only be valid to subscribed/unsubscribed users.

When you submit data to through a form such as those found on contact pages or comment forms cookies may be set to remember your user details for future correspondence.

Some of the pages of this site offer the possibility to the users to leave a comment. Cookies may be set to remember your user details and have it completed when you return to your blog. Users are responsible for the content of their own comments.

We may, in certain situations, use Adobe Flash Player to deliver special content, such as video clips or animation. To improve your user experience, Local Shared Objects (commonly known as Flash cookies) are used to provide functions such as remembering your settings and preferences. Flash cookies are stored on your device, but they are managed through an interface different from the one provided by your web browser.

In some special cases we also use cookies provided by trusted third parties.

This site uses Google Analytics which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solution on the web for helping us to understand how you use the site and ways that we can improve your experience. These cookies may track things such as how long you spend on the site and the pages that you visit so we can continue to produce engaging content. For more information on Google Analytics cookies, see the official Google Analytics page.

We also use social media buttons and/or plugins on this site that allow you to connect with your social network in various ways (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). For these to work the social media sites will set cookies through our site which may be used to enhance your profile on their site or contribute to the data they hold for various purposes outlined in their respective privacy policies.

Where a commenting service provided by third parties (e.g. Facebook) is installed, it might use a cookie to collect web traffic data for the pages where the comment service is installed, even when users do not use the content commenting service.

Also, our site allow you to view content hosted on external platforms directly from our pages and interact with them, e.g. embedding YouTube videos, third party online surveys and third party online ticketing services. Where a content/service of this kind is embedded/installed, it might use a cookie to anonymously gather web traffic data, even when users do not actively use it.

Enabling these cookies is not strictly necessary for the website to work but it will provide you with a better browsing experience. You can delete or block these cookies, but if you do that some features of this site may not work as intended.

The cookie-related information is not used to identify you personally and the pattern data is fully under our control. These cookies are not used for any purpose other than those described here.

 

How to control cookies

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help or www.aboutcookies.org). You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work. Unfortunately in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to this site.