How shady is my website?

Published on 2023-08-21

Rakhim at rakhim.org made a comic that humorously presents the 2-dimensional distribution of the number of blog posts versus the number of posts about elaborate blog setups. I’m pretty sure I’m on the bottom right corner of the plot, so I may as well just continue the trend and add yet another post about my perfect ¹ setup to the pile.

This site is once again redesigned. It was previously generated using Quarto, with a snippet for analytics attached to every page because I’m addicted to the sweet imaginary Internet points called impressions. The site also carried some quirks from Quarto that I didn’t bother to dig deep enough to fix. For example, the prefers-color-scheme user preference is not honored, which made me feel sorry for the dark mode dwellers. I had no choice (barring a horrible hack that calls some supposedly private JavaScript functions from the framework that I found) but to greet you with the blindingly bright #ffffff background color.

This new, revamped design is created with the help of Hakyll, a Haskell library for generating static sites. Half of the reason behind this choice is just to give myself an excuse to waste some time playing with Haskell. Another half of the reason is that I get to write the posts in Org Mode in Emacs.

So, how shady is my website?

Do you collect my data?

No. I’ve considered some privacy-respecting visitor counters such as GoatCounter, but then I realized that I may push it one step further by cutting my addiction on visitor counts once and for all. Plus I can now put this website does not track you into the footer like Matthew Graybosch does as a badge of pride.

Do you let $BigCorp collect my data?

No. Apart from the static hosting service, which is Cloudflare at the moment, that can unfortunately see the requests you send to their server. I may eliminate this one by hosting on my own infrastructure, but that’s a project for another day™.

Webfonts are also removed, because I no longer want to impose my taste for font design to you the readers. It’s now up to you to configure your browser to use your favorite sans-serif font for Latin scripts. A side effect for this decision is that you don’t need to worry whether the webfont services track you (they can!), and that tens of kilobytes are shaved from your metered Internet bill.

Do you run code on my machine?

No. Without the need of user tracking, there’s no excuse for me to run JavaScript code on your machine anymore. Unless future me decides to write some high-effort posts with interactive demonstrations like those awesome explainers from Red Blob Games by Amit Patel, I’d refrain from adding JavaScript to this website. Consequently, the website now works ² in Emacs’ builtin eww browser just as well as it does in Firefox.