Hi there, I’m very proud to announce that thehalvening.com is now clean, with no risk of relapse !
Thehalvening.com is 8 years old. When Elise and I launched the first version, we were young and wild. At that time, Facebook, Twitter, Google were still cool and desirable. How things change…
It has been a natural move to onboard a few of these once-desirable stuff with us. In concrete terms, visitors of thehalvening.com were greeted with :
- google ads
- twitter widget
- google analytics for tracking
Google ads were the first to leave. We used it for monetization. It paid a bit during the 2016 Halvening. It was only 18 months later that I realized how ugly the homepage looked and thus decided it was time for Google ads to go. We now rely solely on donations, plus a very thin stream of Brave tokens. Google ads were gone in march 2018.
In the same commit I also removed the Twitter widget. It was slowing the site down while bringing very low value to the users.
Finally, as of today, the last (but not least) toxic bit of code served by thehalvening.com is gone : farewell Google Analytics ! It’s really a pity that I used this junk script for so long, who leeches users data for Big Tech profits. Matomo comes as a replacement solution. This open source, privacy-centric analytics suite allows me to have just the required metrics to run and optimize the site.
What I built is now more aligned with my values and what I wish for : an open web that genuinely brings useful and fun things to people !
Thanks for reading.