I finally bit the bullet and added a cookie consent popup to the site. Skip to the part where I explain these cookies.

I was trying my best to make this site as lean and hassle-free as possible, but I’m also very curious about visitors – how many people see these posts? Are some posts more popular than others? Should I post more of something?

I hoped that github will provide me with some stats one this – I wasn’t expecting much, but then again, I didn’t need much. Github, however, gives me zero information on traffic. I’ve been staring at this “data” for months now:

Github doesn’t have enough data

I get that I don’t have thousands of views, but I’m sure that at least some of my friends see this…? (And how many visitors should I have before I get access to data anyway?)

So I’ve been looking around for other options. This is a static site, so I can’t run any server-side code – that would be the easiest method, and the most user-friendly one. I seriously contemplated renting a server just for this, but I kinda like github.io and I feel that users can trust it too.

Other methods are available, too, most notably Google Analytics. The problem with these is that they store a cookie (which is used to make sure that a single user isn’t counted twice) and I really, really hate cookie-consent dialogs. The consent is enforced by law, and I found no service that does not need a consent dialog. I feel like these actively make websites worse – they are annoying and provide no useful information to the user. They usually point to confusing explanations, list hundreds of ad providers, and obscure legal text; I sincerely believe that nobody reads these. Even worse, if I don’t agree (and most of time, I don’t agree just out of spite), then the consent dialog will be displayed to me every single time I visit that particular site, meaning that I have to face this minor annoyance multiple times, which adds up.

So what am I using these cookies for?

I store a single Google Analytics cookie, which is used to make sure that when you visit the site multiple times, you will only be counted once. The cookie contains a string of random numbers and letters, something like this: GA1.2.211694324.1557125602

When you visit the site, google analytics checks if this string has been used before, and if not, it increases the unique visitor count.

That’s it.

I don’t know who you are, there is no personal information associated with this string, I’m not trying to sell you anything and you won’t be tracked in any way – except now I know if you visited the site.

I opted out from nearly every feature of Google Analytics because I don’t need them.

If you need more information or you want to educate yourself on the subject, here are some simple explanations:

I would also like to apologize for the inconvenience this causes you. It’s a minor annoyance, but still an annoyance – sorry for that.