horizone

I decided mid last year that I was going to redesign one of my projects to break away from 3rd party service reliance for the sake of protecting the end users privacy.

First thing to go was Google Analytics. Depending on your product and how you want to grow it, it’s possible that you don’t need the range of reporting that GA provides. I know I didn’t.

After that I looked at what other third party services and trackers that were being used. I’ve been opposed to advertising for 15 years, so I didn’t need to worry about them as they were never there. I work on other projects that are infested with them and I would love to remove them but marketing loves its metrics and ability to squeeze a dollar out where ever possible. External commenting services were removed (that was more laziness on my behalf) and social login methods.

Lastly (and this one was hardest to part with due to the benefits), CDNs. I decided that any external request would be a problem, as once the request leaves and gets redirected a few times you’ve provided who knows how many companies data on your end user. Every file would have to reside within the realms of the project.

In the end I’m happy to say that my project (which is still in development) is and will always be self contained, for the protection of the end user.

I do realise that there are other external factors that can track the user, but from my end I’m doing what ever I can to minimise those factors.

Going to be an interesting birthday for me that year. Still surprised that this hasn’t been fixed yet, we’ve known about it for a while.

> It’s really easy to write PHP, which means that people who don’t know about escaping input write PHP.

Not trying call you out on this point, more it made me laugh. Our lead developer strips out characters that break his XML importer (lets just say they are standard common characters, heck, he changes chr(13) to a string so he can switch it back later because he doesn't know how to handle multiple lines in an XML value). People who don't know how to escape inputs / actually handle data properly are in every language. We cringe on a daily basis.

Personally, I switched from Perl to PHP around 2002 (I could be wrong with the year) as I wanted to move from flat file dbs to MySQL. I wouldn't say that it beat Perl, it was just made web development more accessible. I still wrote in Perl after that, but for server side scripting (processing, cleanup etc).

You are right, I jumped the gun and read the opposite. Cheers. Sorry Parent.

I am some what the opposite. The person that comes after me should be able to read and understand what I wrote without line by line documentation. If they can't, they are not fit for the position. Although, if there is a quirk within the code where something needs to be explained, it will have documentation.

2 Factor works. I'm forced to log back in when ever there is server troubles, which is annoying, but what ever.

I too wish more people in the PHP world would use parameters, but alas, your second paragraph sums up the common mentality. If its still going to make money, why go to the effort? Personally I love sending a query with an object and just let the engine do the work.

I see this sort of thing on a daily basis, but it's not from PHP developers but our "lead" Delphi developer. I've tried to convince him of the benefits of parameter based queries, but believes that it would be a performance hit (performance for him maybe, he'd have to struggle to learn something new).