Cordula's Web. Neanderthal. Question mark.
Neanderthal Valley. Question mark. Copyright © 2006 Cordula's Web. Gallery 24

Frequently Asked Questions

If your question is not listed here, or if you would like us to improve something, please feel free to drop us a note. Your continued support and feedback greatly helps keeping this site alive.

-- Cordula's Web Editorial Team.

Would you publish my contribution?

  • I'd like to help. What do you need?

    Please have a look at our Help Wanted page. And, by the way, thank you for the thought!

  • Would you publish my poem?

    Poems that meet our very selective criteria are highly welcome. First and foremost, the poems should be on topic. Sad and broken-heart like poems are our favorites, love and friendship poems are great too, as long as they are of high quality and emotional intensity. Please feel free to browse our collection to get an overall feeling of what we're looking for. Every poem must somehow reflect something we, the editors, feel towards Cordula or what she may have loved to read. Last, but not least, we currently don't accept unrhymed or unmetric "freestyle" poems.

  • I've written a story. Would you publish it?

    Please refer to previous question's ("Would you publish my poem?") answer. Stories, like poems, should be of high quality and emotional intensity. Here again, we must be able to relate your story to Cordula. If you are a talented writer, but lacking rhyming practice, submitting a story is a great alternative.

  • Can you publish my photographs?

    Sure. Here are the main criteria:

    1. Photographs should be in landscape format (wider than higher). Their width must be at least 640 pixels. An aspect ratio of 4:3 would be ideal, though we also accept pictures that are a little bit taller or shorter. We'll scale down all pictures to a width of 640 pixels for you.
    2. The upper third of the picture (often "the sky") should not be too bright, because it would not match with our dark banner. If possible, use a polarization filter and/or a properly calibrated white balance.
    3. Our preferred colors are blue and green with an overall darkish peaceful mood. Please compose your pictures accordingly. Of course, this is not an absolute rule. A lot of pictures look great even with other colors, e.g. vivid ones.
    4. For legal reasons, we can't publish photographs that show visible faces. Doing this would require us to obtain a press release from those people and this is too much of a hassle. Photographs showing copyrighted material (e.g. taken in museums) cannot be published either.

How can I contribute?

  • How can I submit my poem or story?

    Please send us an e-mail with your poem or story.

    Contributors are required to provide a valid e-mail address: we will confirm this by replying to your mail. To protect you against spambots, your address will not be published on our site. Please provide your full name (or, if you absolutely insist, your pseudonym), so we can attribute your poem correctly. If you would like us to link to your home page, please add its URL as well.

    If we accept your poem (see below), we'll ask you if you would like to provide a small biography of yourself, so we can add it to our author biographies. This is optional and entirely up to you.

  • How can I submit my photographs?

    Please let us know that you want to submit pictures. You can either specify an URL (Web or FTP server) so we may pick them up ourselves, or just attach them to your mail. Please don't forget to provide a small legend, so we know and tell what the picture is showing. We will slightly copy-edit your photographs (we'll add the www.cordula.ws marker that you know from other pictures, improve colors, sharpness, balance, contrast and scaling etc...).

  • What happens when I submit a poem, story or photograph?

    Your poem, story or photograph will be e-mailed to everyone in our team and we'll cast our votes. If your contribution gets the unanimity of votes, it will be added to Cordula's Web. We'll let you know (using the mandatory e-mail address that you provided) how we voted and, if published, the URL of your contribution.

  • Who owns the IP rights of things I contributed?

    You retain full copyright to your poem, story or photograph. By submitting your contribution to Cordula's Web, you implicitely grant us a license to publish it on our site. Your copyright will be acknowledged at the end of the poem or story, or just below the photograph.

Who's Cordula?

  • Who or what is Cordula?

    Cordula is a feminine first name. Its etymological meaning stems from the Latin name cordis (little heart). There's even a Cordula Legend you may want to read about, though this legend is not the topic of this site.

  • Why did you call your site Cordula's Web?

    Our site is dedicated to Cordula Philipps; our dearest friend and teacher. This is our tribute to her and our way to show appreciation and gratitude for all she's given and taught us.

  • Tell me more about Cordula Philipps.

    Our friend Cordula always loved to flirt with mystery. Please understand that we're honoring this particularly charming trait of her personality by not disclosing any personal details on this site. She's very dear to our hearts, which should be tell-tale enough.

  • Is Cordula still alive?

    People in our heart's keeping are destined to immortality.

Who are you?

  • Who are you?

    We are a team of individuals who had the priviledge to meet and to know Cordula, either personally, or indirectly. Cordula influenced the life of everyone in this team in a substantial way.

  • Where are you located?

    International teams like us know no single location. Cordula's Web server is currently near Dallas, TX, but the team members are from multiple countries.

  • Which languages to you speak?

    English, German, French. Less fluently (we can read, but don't write) Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Latin and a little bit Russian as far as a good dictionary is available. Our primary language is English.

  • Who's in your team?

    We act collectively as a team and prefer not to list individual members here. You may get a reply from one of our members directly, though it's entirely up to them to disclose their personal identity.

  • Can I join your team?

    Sorry, only people who know or knew Cordula personally are eligible for joining our team. We would still love to welcome you as a contributor though.

Technical Questions

  • Why can't I see images anymore (since 2006/07/17)?

    You need to configure your browser to send us a valid Referer HTTP header. This is standard behavior for almost all browsers; unless you've explicitely disabled it. Some firewalls can also be configured to block Referer headers (in a [somewhat misguided] attempt to enhance privacy). If your firewall permits it, just add www.cordula.ws to its Referer whitelist. Some anonymizing services don't set up Referer headers the way they should; if you use one of those services to access Cordula's Web, please complain to them, it's a bug they should fix in their software. If you still have problems getting images, please let us know.

    Eventhough we've always asked webmasters not to link to our images directly, more and more bloggers had been hotlinking to us recently, without bothering to ask for permission first, thus resulting in a huge increase of bandwidth theft. We tolerated this in the past, but this extra traffic had recently been eating up a sizeable chunk of our bandwidth.

    To webmasters and bloggers: We didn't add this basic Referer check to annoy anyone: we're pleased to see our photos used elsewhere; but you guys kept hammering us with such a huge additional traffic that we can't keep this up anymore. You're invited to use our images on your websites and blogs, but please follow the instructions on our copyright statement on our legaleze page.

  • What software did you use to create this site?

    Prior to our relaunch 2006/07/05 we didn't use any software at all. All HTML files were crafted manually and edited with a simple text editor (we used Emacs). Now we're storing all poems, stories, quotes, authors and meta-data like, say, image legends etc. in a set of XML files, and use an XSL template and the xsltproc XSLT processor to generate the XHTML files automatically.

  • What were the reasons for the relaunch?

    It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to manually edit HTML files, esp. when you have to update links back and forth between pages everytime you add or remove a page. Doing this automatically is a huge time-saver and it prevents broken links and similar mistakes.

    We also wanted to upgrade from "HTML 4.01 Transitional" to "XHTML 1.0 Strict" so we had to overhaul all HTML files anyway.

    Now that most but the weirdest browers' Cascading Style Sheets' support has become ubiquitous, we've finally been able to get rid of the old tables-based layout (hack), replacing it with a more flexible CSS-based layout.

  • A CSS-based layout... what's that?

    With CSS, we're able to control where elements get displayed on the page and how they should look like. Because CSS is separate from the XHTML page, we can provide both the traditional black/white/blue style for normal browsing, as well as a clean, image-less printer-ready page when you hit your browser's "Print" button.

    Thanks to the flexible nature of CSS, we've also been able to enhance accessibility to Cordula's Web for people using text-only browsers like lynx, w3m, braille terminals or text-to-speech audio readers, and to users of mobile browsers with tiny displays. Accessibility is enhanced because we moved the main content of a page (the poem, the story, etc...) to the top of the source, and then use CSS to visually move the menu, the images etc. around this content. A text-based browser will "see" the main content first, and therefore show it or read it aloud before everything else.

  • You're a distributed team. How do you synchronize?

    Through e-mails, using specific addresses and commands. Everything gets collected at a central location, verified, merged into the XML files and then the XHTML files are being regenerated and modified ones are finally uploaded to the server.

  • I'm getting email-spam from your domain cordula.ws...

    You shouldn't, because we don't send spam and never did... but spammers use forged sender addresses, using made up email-addresses, including some pretending to be from our domain cordula.ws. If your e-mail provider implemented Sender Policy Framework (which they definitely should), their e-mail servers will automatically filter out those spams, because we provide a valid SPF record for our domain in the DNS.

  • What happened to Cordula Wiki?

    We've closed Cordula Wiki because it didn't prove popular enough to justify its continued maintenance. The infrastructure is still in place, and we may reactivate it again, if enough submitters ask for it and are willing to contribute regularly to it.

  • I can't access Cordula's Web with Lynx (406 error). Why?

    This is a misconfiguration of the server. Something (probably mod_security) is blocking the HTTP_USER_AGENT header "Lynx". I've reported the issue to our hoster, and I hope that they'll fix it ASAP. In the mean time, please override Lynx's user-agent by adding the flag -useragent=blah at the command line. Instead of "blah", you can set anything else, as long as it is not "Lynx". (2009/09/06)

    Update 2009/09/06: Problem fixed. It was indeed a mod_security misconfiguration.

  • Instead of a Search Box, there's a message "Loading Google Search Box... (if JavaScript is enabled)". Why?

    Because Google Custom Search Engine now requires JavaScript, you need to enable JavaScript in your browser if you want to see and use the search box.

    You may allow JavaScript globally in your browser. However, if you're using Firefox with the NoScript extension, it's highly recommended that you disable JavaScript globally, and enable it selectively on an as-needed and per-site basis. You can still use Cordula's Web without JavaScript, but if you need custom search, please (temporarily or permanently) whitelist www.cordula.ws in NoScript.

Miscellaneous Questions

  • What does Per Amica Silentia mean?

    This Latin sentence means: "to a silent friend." It originally appeared in Virgil's The Aeneid: Book 2, Line 255: Tacitae per amica silentia lunae, which translates to "Through the friendly silence of the soundless moonlight." W. B. Yeats wrote a poem with the title "Per amica silentia lunae" (1918).

    We're dedicating Cordula's Web to our silent friend.

  • And what about Ad Astra Per Aspera?

    The original Latin sentence is actually "per aspera ad astra." which translates approximately to "through adversity to the stars," "a hard road leads to Heaven" but also to "through suffering to renown."

    We've selected this motto, because it is in our opinion the most important and valuable lesson that Cordula taught us, though it is the hardest to learn and it takes no less than a whole lifespan to fully appreciate.

    Ad Astra Per Aspera is also the motto of the State of Kansas.

  • What does the logo on the upper left of the page mean?

    This is a broken multi facetted cross. According to its creator, this broctagon (broken octagon) represents both the loneliness of the facet that has been broken out, and the ensuing instability of the remaining parts.

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