Cookies policy

This website uses a variety of cookies to measure traffic and improve the blog's performance. These include, but may not be limited to, Statcounter. For further information about any of these services or the cookies they use, please clink the link.

I also regularly link to a variety of other reputable sites which use third party cookies as part of their plug-ins. These include, but may not be limited to:
Click on any of the links to read the individual site's privacy policy.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files placed on your computer or device by a website or read by a website. They contain only text and are usually used to make a website visit easier. For example, remembering your user ID so you don't have to log in every time you visit a page. Cookies can also remember preferences or settings.

Cookies don't generally store personal information. They are often used in aggregate and often contain randomly generated numbers.

Cookies cannot carry viruses and cannot install anything harmful onto your computer. They are just text files.
For more information, visit allaboutcookies.org, or check out the BBC's cookie policy.

Should I keep cookies turned on?

Cookies are generally good for websites and some features will not work without them. This is because the internet is "stateless" - if I access a website and then you access the same website and we both want to buy a product on that site, the pages of the website needs to know which of us is which. It does this by saving a "memory" of the site visit to the user's browser using cookies.

With that in mind, it's probably a good idea to accept cookies as they're safe and help make websites work better.

Possible types of cookies

There are various types of cookies. There's "First Party" - cookies set by the site visited by the user; "Third Party" - those set by sites other than the one you've visited. This usually happens when a third party's service is used in the first party's site - eg. a Twitter feed or a "buy" link from Amazon.

Cookies can be either "Session cookies" or "Persistent cookies". A session cookie is only saved in your browser's memory and never written onto your hard drive. They expire as soon as you close your browser. A persistent cookie has a specified life time set by its expiration date. This date can be any amount of time.

Turning off cookies

If you want to turn off cookies, use your browser's cookie preference settings. Check out the help menu of whichever browser you're using or click here for information on how to do it on most browsers. Some browsers will let you choose to block third-party cookies, and their are also browser extensions that enable you to keep track of what's going on (I use Awesome Cookie manager for Chrome and Privacy Badger for Edge, and they're both good).