I figured this was as good a time as any to just mention a couple of topics on a technical level with my site. I’ll be updating my Privacy Policy info soon for all of this, but as a step to keeping my info as up-to-date for visitors as I can, here are just a few quick notes.
Advertising
By now you’ll likely have noted the advertisements showing up on my site for various outlets. I signed up for Google AdSense some years back and I have attempted on a few occasions to add the AdSense stuff to my site. This is my latest attempt and I’m going to try to keep this going permanently this time.
My understanding of how this works is that various vendor sites you may visit will attempt to big their ads to show up through Google’s ad network. So if you visit Home Depot to look for some products, don’t be surprised if you come here and see Home Depot ads on my site. If you visit Amazon a lot, there will probably be Amazon ads regularly on here.
I don’t really control what ads are showing up in that sense, I just have added the allowances for Google to handle it’s ad publishing through my site.
Please note, though – if you encounter an advertisement that is really bothersome (hijack ad, something highly inappropriate, etc), please feel free to reach out to me and let me know. I’ll contact the AdSense team and make sure it’s dealt with.
My goal with this is just to see if I can eventually bring enough money in with ads and my content to have it pay for the server regularly on its own.
Analytics
I do use Google Analytics for purposes of tracking where most of my visitors end up, in an effort to determine what content I should provide more of. Yes, it uses some form of cookie technology and does track you, but I am not selling this data or doing anything with it other than determining the best articles and content to provide.
Google may do some additional work with this data, too, but I honestly can’t answer a lot more on that myself. Still, if you are concerned, reach out to me and I’ll try to get you answers on what, if anything, Google does with that data. Again, my own use of the data is strictly limited to “how you found me, why you found me, where you spent your time, and what further content should I focus on generating”. I am not doing anything beyond that.
Push Notifications
Finally, I do make use of a push notifications service to send out occasional updates, especially if I publish something that I think might be worthy of calling attention to. My pickle chips article would be an example of something like that. I am not going to push something out every single time I publish an article at this stage; it has to be something particularly interesting before I do that.
So if you decide to accept notifications, you won’t get one every single time I do anything on here, but I will probably send a couple each week during periods of higher activity.
I hope all of this helps to clear things up for now.