The Cottage Smallholder

I have been doing pretty intensive analysis of our web site performance over the past few days. In summary, this lists every activity that takes place on my laptop browser when I visit CSH.

It shows where delays are happening and which bits could be improved upon to make loading the blog or forum faster.

One aspect that really hit me like a shotgun blast between the eyes is the number of "third party cookies" that are delivered to my laptop. I was never aware that so many were installed before now.

Just to be clear:

1 - cookies are harmless - they are just a few characters of data, such as the time you logged in

2 - "first party cookies" are the ones that our site sends to your computer. They are only used for very simple purposes, such as not showing ads on the forum left-hand sidebar if you are logged in.

3 - "third party cookies" are also harmless.

4 - "BUT" when you visit our site, everybody from Google and Amazon to Twitter (third parties) will send cookies to your computer.

5 - these organisations mean no harm. The information that they collect from many millions of Internet users is simple homogenised to provide statistics.

6 - these organisations make Mega Bucks $$$ from selling this massive wealth of knowledge to the marketing departments of large firms.

7 - like they can forecast that (for example) 36% of people who visit CSH will go on to visit Liberty of London (some chance ) and so they can offer to advise Liberty of the best placements for their online advertising and demand a hefty fee on the back of the free information that they gleaned from you and me.

Twitter is the worst offender. Unintentionally on our part, our site will enable Twitter to send 20+ cookies to your computer. If you visit the Twitter site, that count rises to 30+ and it continually refreshes them so it knows how long you stayed, which Twitterers you viewed and so on.

Personally, I dislike these third party cookies. All browsers have the ability to switch them off. First you need to clear your cookie cache. Here is how you switch them off in FireFox:

Click on Tools on the menu bar. Then Options and the Privacy tab on the pop-up. Uncheck "Accept third party cookies".