Aphorisms Galore! Is 20 Years Old Today!

posted 2017 by Peter Wastholm

Aphorisms Galore! celebrates its first twenty years by launching a few improvements:

• A new and more mobile-friendly layout with fewer images so pages load faster.
• All web traffic is now encrypted (i.e., HTTPS instead of plain HTTP). This improves your privacy and security on the Internet. Thanks to Letsencrypt for making this possible by providing free automatically renewed SSL/TLS certificates!
• All network ads have been removed. This too improves your privacy and security since these ads try to track your online behavior and since these ad networks are sometimes used as a vector for malware. Over the years, I have run banner ads from various networks -- Doubleclick, Fastclick, Valueclick, Google, and others. While they have provided me with many an interesting learning experience, I feel these ads have now outlived their usefulness, especially since what revenue they have yielded has been small and shrinking. In the future, I may run sponsor ads -- i.e., ads from companies paying me directly to advertise specifically on my site. Or I may not. We'll see how that goes.
• Google Analytics code has been removed, again to improve your online privacy. While I'm sure the data they provide is useful to many site owners, I find myself not using it a lot and therefore can't justify subjecting my visitors to the tracking that Google does across all sites that use its analytics service. I'll probably add some sort of local analytics software instead, like Piwik.

As an experiment, I will also add a cryptocurrency tip jar where users and visitors can throw me a virtual coin if they want to show appreciation for the site and encourage its continued development.

Finally, if you haven't had enough of my ramblings, you're welcome to check out a blog post I wrote elsewhere: Twenty Years Without a Plan.

Happy New Year, thanks for your interest in Aphorisms Galore!, and here's to another twenty years!

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