[2.0] A Realm Reborn: Post may contain potential spoilers.
Floating Fortress
Alright, in my defense its practically floating off the ground. We could sit here for days arguing over the detail of one single word and I will still not change my mind on it. Pushing that to the side. This is honestly place is kind of a surprise. I remember being here towards the end of A Realm Reborn, but I don’t think I ever gave much attention to the fortress nor the platform used to travel into it. What mainly piqued my interest was the platform. It has a ring arch that I presume is used to anchor the line onto the cliffside, so that people can traverse across it. Another odd aspect about this “fortress” Its in view distance of Ul’dah. Like I genuinely wonder how they get cargo and people transported into the place.
Side note they could’ve done it by air, but it still makes me wonder behind the purpose of the installation. Unfortunately, I had forgetten since playing A Realm Reborn.
Goaccess and general tracking stuff
Looks like its another day in which I work on the website. This time I have decided to work on getting a better idea on the traffic that this website receives. I had looked at some options and can immediately tell you that I will never use Google Analytics. There were a few alternative to Google, but they had required of injecting a script into the pages to track visitors. I personally, don’t have an issue if its used purely for the website, but it felt a bit against my stance against using advertisements. More specifically, personal data collection.
Right now, far as I’m aware with the tools in use. There’s zero form of data collection that is trackable. (Although,there’s one possible exception, but I’ll get to that in a moment.) Personally, I like to stick with that stance since I have no desire to collect user data. The problem with most forms of website tracking. Is that it can result in user tracking. Now there are a few “trackers” that have claimed to be privacy-centric, but seem a bit too much a pain for me to setup. I think Shynet was the best solution, but I continue to have zero luck in getting any docker container to ever work. Plus I wasn’t fond of setting up a database. There’s one solution that I have succesfully implemented without inject code into my website.
Goaccess is a web log analyzer. Essentially, it allows me to take the http server logs and parse that data in readable information. It gives me access to see things like Unique visitor counts and various beneficial statistics. For example, I can see that there has been about 9 visits using Opera as the browser since 07/05/2022. All of this data was grabbed via nginx’s log files. Because of this there’s no tracking built into the html. There are a few downsides though.
The main problem is that I don’t get really specific information. To be quite honest the only useful metric for me, is the visitor count. I have no idea how long it takes for users to load a single page or if they connect to the homepage and then bounce. I might be able to see most visited pages by looking at the amount of requests per page, but I don’t think Goaccess has a clear way to show that info. Might have to tinker with that idea. Essentially, I can get a lot of information, but it doesn’t do much into terms of tracking. The only piece of info that could server as “identifiable” is the ips shown in the logs. Technically, I can take an user’s ip and correlate it to a city/country via GeoIp. Now currently, I have it set to anonymize in the config settings, plus I have the geo location stuff disabled (since I didn’t want to make an account to get the data) The only problem, is that I can change the values and be able to see that data whenever I want. However, I think its more of an issue if I can correlate that data with a specific user.
Currently, with the amount of data I have. I don’t believe I have enough to correlate it to any specific user. Now there might be ways to pin down an user to a specific city, but thats probably the extent that I can do with using server logs. Either way, its safe to say that this may be a form of identifiable data. As such, I have no intentions to use or share this data even for monetary purposes. I will only post data that can’t be correlated to an individual user, if possible. Watch this bite me in the ass in the future.
Fairly hefty post for today. I hope this offers some form of interest to some.