I normally have ads and trackers blocked almost everywhere when I use the Internet. I have had a deep antipathy to ads since I was a teenager — even when they seem targeted to the context in which they occur, they seem off-topic and distracting to me. Evidently they distract me more than they do most other people I know. When I attend a concert or play, I normally remove the few relevant pages from the Playbill booklet and throw the rest out. When I occasionally subscribe to a magazine, if it's something I'll be reading carefully (such as Foreign Affairs) I go through the thing and tear out every page I can that consists wholly of ads on both sides. Back in the days when I watched television, before the arrival of Tivo and such things, I was vigilant about shutting off the sound as soon as an ad started. Actually, watching ads with the sound off is a good way to study their visual organization and tactics — something I found quite fascinating. Ah, I'm digressing. I was talking about site-analytics trackers.
In order to have more control over my site I am hosting this blog statically on Bitbucket. And Bitbucket doesn't currently enable users to see statistics about static blogs. Although I don't like being tracked, myself, it seems that installing trackers from an analytics service is the only reasonable recourse I have.
So I have signed up with Google Analytics, in order to see how it works. To readers who feel as I do about trackers, I apologize for this intrusion. (I think you know how you can block most of the effect of the tracker script.)
Another factor in this decision has been that Google doesn't index my blog very well. I'm not sure why. Possible issues that may mark the site as unoriginal or unsafe in Google's search structure:
- Much of the content before 2014 duplicates an older WordPress blog that I have left in place in order not to destroy existing links to it. That may mark the site as unoriginal.
- I don't supply keywords or categories, which I find mildly inconvenient to choose manually, which may mark the site as inefficient to index.
- Every page has the whole list of past posts at the bottom — something I like very much, but that may register as repetitive.
- Bitbucket's SSL certificates currently don't cover subdomains, so the site may register as unsafe.
I'm hoping to find that Google now indexes the blog more effectively. Perhaps I'll report back on the results of this experiment before long.
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