Disabling comments and Google Analytics

So, after ~20 years of maintaining this blog, I decided to disable comments entirely on the posts here. And turning off Google Analytics.

This was primarily driven by a recent privacy test I did on the blog, and to my utter shock, almost a dozen different websites seem to be contacted with every page load. I generally expected Google (for the analytics) and Disqus (for the comments) to be the websites figuring out here, so I felt absolutely betrayed by the bunch of other websites they call under the hood.

For comments, it is not worth keeping open an avenue for my handful of visitors who may give me some feedback. I have a contact page and a Twitter profile where people have contacted me in the past. That should be good enough for me, I guess.

For stats, which I would still love to have, I am presently trying out Plausible, to see if it is worth paying $9 per month.