Size of This Site

The BedroomLAN site is tiny. On a good day, it can get 120 page hits — and many of those are search engines or spambots. We are aware the world has left small pages like this behind in favour of GitHub and other immense commercial ventures. Even the term web page is obsolete in the days where 300 words and a stock photograph merit the installation of a professional Content Management System.

To put things in perspective: Alexa ranks the BedroomLAN site at 1,732,033 at the time of last update. It dropped 241,573 positions in the past three months.

This site is not a commercial entity, it's a lonely labour of love by a number of individuals who expect nothing from it and still get less than they expect.

In short: we really don't care who visits here, and you really can't do very much at all.

But like every web server in existence, ours collects some data.

What Is Collected

The BedroomLAN site in its current incarnation is static. There is no database. There are no user accounts. There are no names or pseudonyms.

That having been said, the web server logs the standard amount of information for security purposes:

• The IP address originating the request.
• The time and date of the request.
• The page requested, including whether or not the request was successful, the size of the response, and all that jazz.
• The URL the browser came from (the Referrer), if the browser sends us that. Most modern browsers won't, and most modern sites instruct browsers not to transmit that.
• How long the request took.

These logs are retained for a maximum of 14 days, but server backups retention is 90 days, so the information is retained for a maximumof 104 days.

Many pages also embed the Disqus comment service. If you see the comment widget, its own privacy policyapplies.

How is Collected Information Used

Server logs are used for forensics in case of an attempted security breach or Denial of Service Attack. This is pure paranoia, of course.

Internal Record Keeping

We may use the web server logs to improve the site. Usually, we ignore it utterly.

Web server information is retained for a short time. It's often backed up for up to three months. Given how quickly IP addresses change in this IPv4-depleted time, it's pretty difficult to e-stalk someone this way. I can tell you're a dork who looks up useless information, but that's okay: I'm the dork who published it in the first place.

Analytics

Previous versions of this site used Piwik, then Google Analytics. We have now removed both. There is nearly nothing to analyse.

As of 2019-01-13, Google Analytics has been added back in anonymisation mode. All ad-related tracking is disabled, so it can't track visitors via their Google IDs.

Anonymised visitor data retention is the minimum allowed, 14 months from first access (not last access).

We use Google Analytics to see what pages have the most interest and merit improvement. That's it. As we sell nothing, we do not run campaigns, and ‘conversion rate’ has no definition here.

If in doubt, we recommend you use AdBlock Plus and/or Ghostery. Either of these will block analytics traffic.

Search

The current incarnation of the BedroomLAN site has no search feature.

When it did, this applied, reproduced here as a historical curiosity: when you use the BedroomLAN search function (on the menubar), you're searching using JavaScript and a static dataset. Your search terms aren't transmitted online. No state is kept, no customisation is possible, and no cookies are set. There is no tracking. There isn't even a spoon.

Comments

Many pages embed the Disqus comment service, which is third-party. Their privacy policyapplies.

If you use Adblock Plus or something similar (and you really, really should), and you disapprove of the Disqus policies, you can easily block the comment section. You can't effectively disable it from the site itself, because BedroomLAN is a static site and keeps no centralised state.

How the Site Uses Cookies

BedroomLAN is static. We have no user accounts, thus serve no session-identifying cookies, and so we keep no state. We can't keep state, because the site is static. We don't tailor user experience. What you see is the same dubious content everyone else does.

However, both Piwik and Disqus likely set cookies.

This applies for other types of state storage techniques, like HTML5 client-side storage: BedroomLAN doesn't use any. Piwik and Disqus might.

There are a number of non-identifying cookies used to improve your experience and help the site not look like an escapee from 1994 (which it actually is). These cookies are set by JavaScript code on your browser and used by JavaScript code on your browser. The site back-end doesn't use them at all, although they are sent along with HTTP requests. These cookies are:

• lastVisit: records the time (as seconds since the Unix Epoch of your last visit to each index page (the pages with the square tiles). JavaScript code running on your browser adds a ‘new’ or ‘updated’ ribbon to content that's new or updated since your last visit (plus a little bit). We no longer use this cookie as we hardly ever have repeat visitors. Tiles in the indexes are now marked ‘new’ or ‘updated’ if this happened in the last few months.

• befunge: only used in the Befunge Playground application. It records the last program selected and whether the tool is in program edit or run mode.

• greekKeyboard: only used in the Greek Typing article, this cookie records user preferences for the typing widget. It records the user's selected (not detected!) operating system/environment and last chosen tutorial. No identifying information is stored.

• polyExplorer: only used in the Polyamory Explorer toy, this cookie records the number of nodes of the graph selected by the user, and the edges enabled in the graph.

CloudFlare, YouTube, Google and Disqus will set their own cookies. At last count, they set up to ten each. We have no control over these.

Third party cookies and code

We use public access CDNs to serve some of our assets such as the standard JavaScript and CSS files for jQuery, Bootstrap, etc. Some CDNs (e.g. Cloudflare) add cookies to their response. Those are beyond our control.

We often embed the Disqus comment service. If you see the comment widget, its own cookie and privacy policyprivacy policy applies.

We also occasionally embed YouTube videos. The YouTube video player does its own thing and its own cookie and privacy policy applies.

Google Analytics also adds its own cookie so it can tell when someone is revisiting a site.

Links to Other Websites

Despite this clearly amazing, world-class website visited by at least three bots and two humans every month, we don't own the Internet. Unfair, right?

So if you follow links to other sites, you're on your own. You won't be in Kansas anymore (unless you were in Kansas to begin with, in which case, please disregard this statement with our sincere apologies and possible condolences). All sorts of horrors await you: broken links, cute kittens, porn, et cetera.

So don't come crying to us.

Newsletters and Spam Policy

BedroomLAN has no newsletter. We'd rather be doing less cool, more interesting things than writing about writing.

We do not email you. Mass or otherwise. We hardly ever respond to personal email as a matter of fact, let alone send it unsolicited. Also, considering the site doesn't even collect email addresses, selling mailing lists or sending spam to BedroomLAN users would be quite the party trick.

Protecting Yourself

You can protect yourself from this clearly dystopian regime by a combination of:

• blocking cookies on bedroomlan.org, and accepting that this will break some of the useless toys and micro apps found here;
• enabling your browser's Do-Not-Track features, which should come enabled by default (and if not, change your browser now);
• using AdBlock Plus;
• using Ghostery;
• not visiting the site (a method successfully employed by over 7 billion non-visitors daily); or
• wearing a tin foil hat.

We recommend all of the above. Okay, perhaps except the tin foil hat. No-one looks good in one.