bobpage.net

About Me

Last edited 21 March 2010 (privacy policy last edited May 2009.)

Hi. I’m Bob Page, networking guy, security d00d, web analytics geek, wannabe photographer, and probably a lot of other stuff too. Originally from Boston, I moved to the SF Bay Area 21 years ago. I am married and currently live in Santa Cruz, California.

A brief professional bio: I am responsible for the analytics platform at eBay. I joined eBay in March 2010. before that I managed a bunch of analytics efforts at Yahoo!. Before Yahoo! I was co-founder, CTO and VP Product Development at Accrue Software, a vendor of enterprise-class web analytics solutions. So yeah, I’ve been doing the web analytics thing since 1996. Before Accrue I worked at Sun Microsystems on a number of network-related applications, including network management, network security, and network access. See LinkedIn for more details.

About This Site

Previously, bobpage.net was a vehicle specifically for topics around Yahoo! and web analytics. It went into hibernation in the fall of 2005 when my life became too crazy. In April 2007 the blog came back with a broader mix of professional and personal stuff. It went dormant again (sigh) but eBay has infused me with a desire to start blogging again, so we’ll see.

The blog is powered by the WordPress software, and a modified version of the Cutline 2.2 theme. The site is hosted at Joyent on one of their shared accelerators. I’m pretty happy with Joyent and no, I don’t get a commission if you join.

All original content on this site is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please give me credit/blame if you use anything here. Note that I do not claim copyright over any of the comments posted by others; contact the poster directly.

About Site Statistics

Joyent makes the server log files readily available, but I can’t be bothered. I did sign up for Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics. I don’t actually analyze the site, since I’m not going to take any action on the analysis. The main reason I use GA and YWA is to understand the products’ functionality.

My Privacy Policy

The web server at bobpage.net may serve you cookies, but feel free to delete them from your browser. The cookies are only useful to you if you post comments and don’t want to keep typing in your contact info each time.

Google and Yahoo! probably put cookies on your system (long before you got to my site). If my usage of GA bugs you, use Firefox, install the Adblock extension, and make sure *.google-analytics.com/* is in your block pattern. If my use of Yahoo! Web Analytics bugs you, you can opt out from data collection — see the Yahoo! web analytics privacy policy.

I may use GA or YWA to see that particular posts are popular, or what search keywords or incoming links brought traffic to the site, but it’ll be in aggregate form. I do not use the data to profile you or market to you, and I don’t ship the usage data anywhere but to Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics.

If you post a comment to a blog entry, I get an email with the info you put in the form, as well as your IP address, because I manually approve new replies from people that the blog hasn’t seen before. I don’t keep the email after I approve/reject the blog comment.

Regarding data retention – the raw log files on the server go back four (4) months. I ignore them unless I am debugging.

Other Representations

This is my personal site – note the domain name. I do not speak for eBay or other people or organizations on this site, just myself. Anything here is my own opinion, and not necessarily anyone else’s.

Contacting Me

I welcome your questions, comments and feedback. You can comment on a posting (subject to moderation for spam control), or post to your own blog and link to this one. If you prefer email, send to my last name at neato.org.

Thanks for reading.