Insights without Tracking

Around 2 years ago on this blog I removed Google Analytics, then a year later I removed Disqus. I am fighting to protect the privacy of all readers because the era of data is here.

Now I've got a few more things to perfect to score great on privacy scanners, but something happened that upset me. When I upgraded to Ghost v4 - there was a new 3rd party thing added that I can not control.

Hidden on my page is this new snippet.

<script defer src="https://unpkg.com/@tryghost/portal@~1.10.0/umd/portal.min.js" data-ghost="https://connortumbleson.com/" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

• This is a 3rd party load to Unpkg (CDN) to support a new "Portal" feature from Ghost.
• It cannot contain SRI hash, because the version is not locked.
• It has the ability to update to any version that meets the constraint as needed.
• I now fail a category I once passed.

Now, Ghost v4.4.0 came out and gave the ability to remove this script at the cost of removing the entire feature. So now it's a tough choice - I have to toss my email subscriber benefit away or keep the CDN. For now, I'm keeping the CDN.

So then I got curious, even though I trashed Google years ago. Can I still have some insights to what visitors are finding?

Sure enough, the Google Search Console has some insights. Out of the gate we can see impressions on Google and how many clicks got funneled from that.

Now of course I'm curious about this rise around September 10 which I know from memory is when the Matrix 4 trailer dropped.

So then I got curious which posts bring the most hits to my blog. So let me link those below with a little snippet of why I wrote that post.

This post I wrote pretty early in my blogging journey as I really wanted to document my own interpretation of understanding the first 3 films of The Matrix. My guess with such a good placement on Google results (#5) that many hits will continue to come to my blog for this one.

For this post I had moved homes and just gotten bombarded with all these same little postcards (as shown above). They screamed like an attempt to scam me like most physical mail in today's world so I did some digging on the company and wrote up a post. I'm constantly getting hits from folks from Google who only searched the phone number. Hopefully could help out some who might have accidentally fallen for this.

This blog is a slow continuation that I tend to do every year of logging all network requests my network does. This post was a great deep dive into the top blocked and allowed requests. A lot of search results are all looking for one domain in particular, which I attributed to Neilsen and plenty of applications under ESPN's belt. In my specific case it was the fantasy football application for Android.

This post I'm honestly surprised for it to be in the top 5. This post I wrote after discovering some of my older original Xbox modchips. This was in preparation for a great talk I did (slides) about modding consoles. I'm not sure why so many people are looking up original Xbox stuff, but they are landing on that page to learn some history of some real old hardware.

I'm glad to see this post still trending, because anytime I stumble upon a Multi-Level-Marketing scheme - I'm hooked. In this circumstance I happen to be downtown and hoping to enjoy a calm day, but instead I run into an army of folks attending a conference for this company. I do some digging and find all the signs that promote an inner circle of folks making money off the intense effort of others from public data. Probably one of my only posts that has had a few comments over the years.

If we look at 5 to 10 - they all seem to be related to Cicada 3301 and Apktool. So to end this, I need to make this site's initial experience better (according to Google).