Theme Change and Getting Unanalytical
I have changed the theme of my blog (as you can see, unless you are syndicating) from Barthelme to something called Fluid Blue. It was mostly out of boredom, and I’m not sure about the result yet.
In other news, I have decided to drop Google Analytics usage on my blog; mostly as a statement in support of privacy activism. I really like Google, and most of the time they do the Right Thing, so I’m not really worried about them stockpiling and misusing our data. However, why should you guys (my less-than-a-handful of readers) trust Google with your data for my benefit?! That’s certainly an attitude I want other people to have toward me, so I’m gonna start from myself and scrap Google Analytics and I don’t think I would use any kind of 3rd-party user tracking system unless their handling and storage of the data is completely and provably secure, anonymous and temporary.
An obvious side effect of this is that I can no longer know how many people are reading my blog. I’d appreciate if you guys (I know there are at least two, so my sentence is syntactically and semantically correct) would be more active, comment-wise!
0. Most readers will see your blog post through RSS readers. Google reader specifically.
1. IP address and system/browser configuration stuff is not sensitive data for anyone. Sharing it with third party applications is not a big deal.
2. User Google webmaster tools.
3. You asked for comments, there you go
By point #0 I was referring to the fact that your theme is usually not seen anyways. Don’t waste time on it.
@MatGill(1):
0: Well, that’s absolutely true, but what the fucking fuck about myself?! I have to see this shit day in and day out. So I’m basically doing this for myself, and the reason that I posted about it is the fact that most people (close to all) would not know it unless I said something.
1: Maybe not for you, but arguably there are some people who care enough that they normally take measure like using Tor and scrubbing their UserAgent headers, etc. Here I’m saying that I’m not letting Google have that information about anyone. Of course, my webserver still generates a log of every access, and the log contains user IP address and agent along with the URI they visited, but I’m not doing anything with that data unless there is a problem with my server (or some kind of attack.) They are there for a month, and they are deleted.
2. I don’t know what they are. I’ll check it out.
3. Thanks! “You see everyone? There’s a good blog reader!
“
I know privacy and anonymity is not a big deal for almost anyone, but I care about it. And I care about respecting other people’s. Of course, I go about this issue with my usual vigorous laziness and general attitude of apathy, but I care!
dude, you know I’m here, as always.