I have migrated the website to Middleman.

The migration was motivated by a frustrating SASS compilation error I was getting with the old Jekyll -based version of the website, after I dediced to remove Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool to get anonymous and aggregated information about how users nagivate on a website. According to Wappalyzer, at least 8,417,000 websites are using this kind of technologies.

The reasons to opt-out from Google Analytics is described in the Tracking Protection for Firefox talk and can be summarized as follows: pages will load a bit faster, and, more important, Google will get less data.

I still have access and will look at my webserver logs using GoAccess. Similar to the way in which I was using analytics, this is to get the number of visitors, the pages which are most visited, and, also, the main errors (such as broken links, pages not served, etc). The main difference, however, is that this data will no longer be available to Google.

Minimalbit.com is a low-traffic website and the type and amount of information which is now protected is ridicolous with respect to the data we voluntarily or involuntarily disclose every day. Still, I believe it is the right thing to do.

If you are interested in reducing the amount of information you disclose when you browse, have a look at the talk above and activate the privacy protection guard in Firefox or a plugin such as No Google Analytics, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, Disconnect.