Hi folks,
some people are working on making the Trojitá's website redesign. The
initial version which I have been shown use various data from 3rd-party
servers, like some CDN for JS delivery, GitHub's social buttons showing how
many people have forked the repo, or Google's font service. I should
probably note that even the current version includes SourceForge's code for
donations via PayPal. In this mail I would like to ask for your opinion
about whether you mind the possibility of tracking by these 3rd parties.
I have mixed feelings about this -- on one hand, privacy-conscious users
can set up an appropriate block list themselves if they mind the additional
tracking. Linking to a CDN for static contents saves the bandwidth in the
long run, and integrating with 3rd party services like Ohloh and GitHub
provides some value for the users (or for the project) -- a nice and
not-so-obtrusive widget showing the latest commits to make it clear that
the project is well alive, etc.
On the other hand, most of this can be made without depending on any 3rd
party at all, either via some server-side scripting, or perhaps by proxying
some of the contents via our own infrastructure (if the upstream provider
actually allows this usage). Of course, everything *can* be done, but
there's also the issue of manpower; I have better things to do than writing
a post-update git hook which puts a couple of recent entries into a .json
file to be displayed by JS on clients, etc.
So, which way shall we go -- shall we go with the masses and embrace the
web blink and don't hesitate to link to third parties, or shall we insist
on do-everything-ourselves and prevent any possibility of the 3rd-party
tracking?
Cheers,
Jan
--
Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
