About Me
Last edited February 8 2015 (privacy policy last edited Sept 2012 to remove Yahoo! Web Analytics.)
Hi. I’m Bob Page, new dad, “big data” graybeard, security d00d, web analytics geek, networking guy, wannabe photographer, and probably a lot of other stuff too. Originally from the Boston area, I moved to the SF Bay Area in 1989. I am married and live in Santa Cruz, California.
A brief professional bio: I am on the board of the Digital Analytics Association. I was previously responsible for the product offerings at Hortonworks, a Hadoop-based data platform. Before Hortonworks, I ran the analytics platform & delivery team at eBay. Prior to eBay I managed a bunch of data/analytics efforts at Yahoo!. Before Yahoo! I was co-founder at Accrue Software, a vendor of enterprise-class web analytics solutions. So yeah, I’ve been doing the digital analytics thing since 1996. 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. After several tries at restarts, it went mostly dormant. Who knows, maybe 2015 will be The Year that blogging returns.
The blog is powered by the WordPress software, using a local variant of the Minnow theme. The site is hosted at Joyent on one of their shared machines. I’m pretty happy with Joyent’s performance. I wish they hadn’t reneged on the “lifetime hosting” I purchased (although I understand their rationale) 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.
Due to the age of some of the posts, and the fact that I had a hosting provider meltdown in 2014 without adequate backups, some links and/or images are broken. I’ll fix or remove them as I come across them.
About Site Statistics
I have an Apache web server log file running, but I only use it for debugging, not for analysis. While I use Google Analytics (“GA”), I don’t actually analyze the site, since I’m not going to take any action on the analysis.
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 probably put cookies on your system (long before you got to my site). If my usage of Google Analytics bugs you, install one of the many ad or cookie blockers. Until September 2012 I used Yahoo! Web Analytics, but Yahoo! shut that down.
I may use GA 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 raw usage data anywhere but to Google 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 who 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 any employers, other people or organizations, just myself. Anything here is my opinion, and not necessarily anyone else’s.
Contacting Me
I welcome your questions, comments and feedback. You can comment on a posting for 14 days (subject to moderation for spam control), or post to your own blog / social media account and link to this one. If you prefer email, send to my last name at neato.org.
Thanks for reading.