All out of cookies...
Chocolate chip, rainbow, oatmeal raisin... There's a lot of cookies out there. Here's why we don't like serving you them.
Hey you, reading this, have you noticed something missing from our site? Something you're so used to seeing on every single site you visit nowerdays?
What's a cookie?
Cookies are a web standard for persisting data on your website. They're tiny chunks of data (or not so tiny as the case often is) that sit on your browser. Websites can set and read these cookies to their hearts content. But if sites can do this whenever they want, why do they show you these banners? Short answer, The Law™️. Here's an article that goes more into depth, just make sure to dismiss that cookie popup before reading.
No sweet treats here.
Here on the PNLY blog, we don't serve up a platter of cookies when you visit us. The only cookies we serve are functional cookies that Ghost requires. You can think of these as the oatmeal raisin of cookies, they're pretty bland and nobody really cares about them, but you need them on the menu. We use these cookies to log you into the Ghost members system and Admin panel (which I sure hope you're not logging into). We also serve up pre-packaged cookies from Cloudflare in some cases. These cookies are used for statistical analytics, but not profiling. The kind of cookies we DON'T serve are invasive trackers or fingerprinting. So no chocolate chips here. Here's more info on the different types of cookie, and here's the types of cookies exempt from those annoying pester bars, which The Law™️ requires sites to show you (and that you should almost always opt out of).
The exceptions.
Sometimes, our blog posts will feature external links or embed content from other sites (like YouTube, Discord, Twitter etc.) which means cookies from those sites can appear within those specific pages. We don't want these cookies, but we're effectively letting those sites run their services on our site, which means they need to serve their own bland, oatmeal raisin-esque functional cookies. Unfortunately there's not really much we can do about this, however your browser (especially more privacy-focused ones) will stop those other sites shoving cookies down your throat.
Why no chocolate chips?
We all love data. Big companies REALLY love data. To the point that it's the business model of many companies to get as much data on you as possible, so they can share that information with other companies that love data EVEN MORE and have a lot of money. But us? We don't really care about your data. We all like chocolate chips, but sometimes you need to be responsible and stick to the slim options, which is what we do here on the PNLY blog. The only information we actually want to know is:
- Are you logged in?
- Are you attacking our site?
- Have you been here before?
If not cookies, how data?
Well, for that first point, we do use cookies as we've covered. But those cookies only exist to let you use the site. As for the other two?
✨ Cloudflare ✨
We get basic traffic data from Cloudflare, as this site is proxied through their network. This means Cloudflare, on our behalf, can detect if you're attacking our site or if you've been here before, based on information you send through their network when accessing our site. This information is anonymized, we never truly know who is accessing our site, just loose demographics (which are pretty vague) and statistics. This means we can have a privacy-first approach while still being able to look at these pretty graphs:
