Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2018-05)

In readiness for GDPR I have taken several steps including:

• Turned off all AdSense ad personalisation in the main 'ad serving' controls, and also flipped the extra protection switch for EU visitors.
• Removed or disabled most advertising on my sites other than EOU, until some aspects of GDPR and ads become clearer, as risk reduction.
• Reduced lifetime of some server logs.

I may do more of the above as time permits.

Note that I have never kept explicit personal data nor directly used persistent cookies or similar on any of my sites since the first one in the '90s, as a matter of security and privacy policy.

It remains unclear if it is possible to serve ads such as AdSense on completely static sites such as EOU that strive not to retain privacy-affecting personal data. For them, any sort of explicit consent is by design difficult to collect or retain. The position will become clearer over time, I hope.

GTmetrix pointed out that I had not fully minified my HTML. It offers the 'fully' minified version for download. I know that the manually-written content is not HTML5 minified because I try to keep it as XHTML. But all the headers and footers, and anything injected, should be fully HTML5 minified.

I then used DiffNow to look at the differences.

Slightly surprisingly I had just one itemtype attribute name as itemType. That will have reduced compression.

I had also an id and a bunch of #ref in-page links quoted, unnecessarily. Fixing the main page build script and re-running shows a reduction of ~10 bytes out of many kilobytes for the uncompressed HTML. Not huge, but will usually turn into effectively free bandwidth.

Kangax HTMLMinifier is already fixing all this for the 'lite' pages.

I was also referring to schema.org inconsistently via http: and https: schemas. Since the two are equivalent, and there is no security implication, I have switched everything to http:.