Just a sort of sidebar note thing- I’ve been running this blog/website since around 2009. A few times, I tried to “monetize” it with advertisements. However, I found they were either annoying, or they were simply not worthwhile. I even fiddled with ad blocker detectors and had a little banner for it. However, For a few years now, I’ve removed all advertisements and things like google analytics from the site wherever I could find it.

I have no plans to change this approach. This blog is my megaphone for presenting information to the world, not a funnel that I can use to make money. And with all the concerns surrounding advertisements and their potential for tracking as well as infection of the system, and websites complaining when you use an ad blocker, I’ve decided that simply not having any advertisements at all is one way to set my blog apart.

One interesting aspect is that a lot of things don’t really declare that they will include tracking. including things like the Facebook “Like” button can often be enough for user tracking on your entire website by Facebook, which means that even if I’m not tracking users outside the site (I’m neither interested nor equipped!), other entities could be tracking traffic to my website and using it for traffic shaping or targeted advertisements towards my website visitors, and yet finding and eliminating all of those sources is not entirely obvious.

For added security as well as to meet some upcoming browser changes in the most popular browsers, I switched the websites default protocol to HTTPS a while ago.

I may not be posting as frequently as I used to but I want my posts and information to be provided in the interest of sharing and not through some implicit moral contract that visitors will support me by allowing advertisements and/or tracking.

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