Account is now live

A better title would be "account is now live again" since once in the past I had an account system in place, but I'll get to that.

When you go to the site now you'll see a "Sign-in" on the menu bar. This is where you will find your new account, with some features already in place. I'll add more over time.

I'm super happy with the account's implementation but if you see something you don't like please let me know.

What's the motivation?

If you're as "prolific" as me in trying out services, you'll have hundreds of accounts created, so why add another one?

This is not a light decision on my part, believe it or not. I like not knowing "who you are", unless you contact me or interact in any way. Not having your details keeps you safe. If something goes wrong here, there's nothing of yours to leak.

Maintaining your data, even if it's just the name and email, is tricky but it's worth it because only then can I provide you with more stuff here on the site.

It will allow me to ship cool stuff

With an account I can explore the tools section of the site a lot more. For now there's only one tool there, just enough for the section to exist, but I have a few ideas. They can't be open to the internet at all, otherwise people would abuse them.

More on that in the coming weeks.

Makes some parts of the site better

So if you want to submit a comment on the site, you can go ahead and write it. If you want to contact me, just type what you need. No need to insert your data.

Want to unsubscribe from the newsletter? Just go to the account and toggle a switch in the email preferences. Super easy.

There will be more stuff like this, but I'm building the foundation and learning in the process.

I already have a few features online

To start slowly I have a few features already available:

1. Bookmark articles. You can bookmark articles and have them available in the account for quick access.

   

2. You can see your comments. Quick access to everything you wrote, so you can check if someone answered.

   

3. You can see what you sent me. Contact requests, estimation requests, all in one place.

These are small, I know, but they already make the account worth having.

I am already developing more stuff that will ship soon, but slow and steady wins the race.

Avoiding SPAM and aggressive crawlers

Spammers are getting CRAZY. If you read my previous post or you have your own site you will know that things are getting more and more aggressive, so I need a way to stop the SPAM from entering the site.

Also, AI crawlers are relentless, basically crawling my whole site and hoovering up the content.

Most of the IPs come from Singapore and they are using a few sophisticated techniques that I won't go into, but the gist is that it's hard to protect the information.

It takes me a while to write these articles and I understand that AI is part of the game, but this is too much. I'm paying for the resources that end up training someone else's models, and getting nothing back.

So I'm still thinking about how to best do this, but an account system can help a bit with the problem.

I won't force you to create an account, but if things get bad, then some articles may end up visible only to signed-in users.

It's not ideal, but it's the only way that I can help people, not bots.

Things are as private as I can make them

I've taken some time to implement the system so that I take the least possible data from you. As you've seen over time, there's no "cookie banner" on the site because I don't need one.

I will start having one cookie now (the authentication) and that's it. I don't use Google CAPTCHA, for example, because it stores cookies on the sites it protects. So I use another tool that doesn't do that.

The same for analytics. Google Analytics stores local information to better profile you. The one I use doesn't. It keeps things anonymous and that's the way I like it.

Emails are sent without any tracking pixels and I only send you the emails you ask for, like newsletters. No welcome emails, no tutorial sequences, none of that.

This is one of the reasons I left WordPress, which leads me to the next section.

There was an account system before

If you're one of the people who remember, thanks for coming here for that long :). Indeed I had an account system before and some of the accounts were migrated (you will be notified of that if you haven't been yet) to this safer system.

I was using WordPress and the system was horrible. I had to bring it down because it was super unsafe.

It took me a while to migrate the site away from WordPress and, as you can see, another while to get the account system to work safely.

I'm gladder every day that I moved away from WordPress. Now I can build tools like this one and know that things are safer.

Final Thoughts

So now that we have a strong foundation, I'll be able to provide more stuff, apart from the articles, that I think will help you while keeping my focus on humans and not bots.

If you have anything in mind that you would like, please let me know. It's not a promise that I'll do it, but I'll take a look.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash