For this week, our assignment was to try tracking users through 3rd party cookies. So instead of only tracking users that came directly to our server site, we could place an image on another web page that would connect to our server, so if anyone went to that webpage, we would know. We learned this week that this is actually what Facebook and other sites do when they place a “like” button on another website.
Thinking about what to do for this assignment, I liked the idea of a creating a “beacon” for people to find, like an internet scavenger hunt or underground network. Could I find people who visited the same places? Could I figure out what connects them? Why am I trying to find them?
Thinking about where I can put beacons, I was limited to websites I can embed source code in and that I have access to. I thought about asking friends to embed something in their websites, but felt uncomfortable with this. I am very interesting in the phenomenon of lurking on the internet - for example, I have noticed that a lot of people watch my Instagram story, but never like my photos and don’t produce much “content” themselves. What if I captured this lurking or lurked back? I have one friend who has over 20k instagram followers so I thought about asking her to post a link on her story (only people with more than 10k followers can do this) and then decided against it for the same reason as before - I felt uncomfortable asking someone else to help me with the tracking.
How it works
First, using Fetch I logged onto the server I made and uploaded the “more user tracking” folder from GitHub with the updated server.js script and image to be used for tracking through 3rd party cookies. When the image is placed in another location on the web, the server will know through 3rd party cookies.
First, I added the default image to different pages on my blog to check to see if the tracking was working. When I visited the different pages, I saw the tracking numbers go up in the terminal output:
Something I noticed was that when I looked at my website with my phone, the server didn’t register that I was returning. However, once I went to the server main page (IP address) and returned to my website with my phone, it remembered my phone. I’m not sure why this is and will have to look into it.
I also tried shutting down terminal and thus shutting down the server and then starting it up again and I found that it remembered me and counted my visits correctly.
I found one of my favorite emojis (and one that seemed to fit the spirit of this assignment), replaced the default image with it in the file package and then put it on the bottom of my personal website using the source code.
I the used the “forever” command in terminal to allow the server to run even if I closed terminal or shut my computer down.
My Test
I kept the server running for a day to see if anyone visited my website. I’m particularly interested in this right now as I’m applying to internships for the summer and was wondering if anyone is actually looking at my portfolio. I decided I wouldn’t visit my blog at all that day (February 12), because that’s normally what skews the analytics on Squarespace.
When I looked at the server log at the end of the day, I had visits from 28 different users and one user who visited twice. I was surprised by this because normally my personal website doesn’t get very much traffic. When I checked this against the Squarespace, their analytics told me I only had one visitor. I am wondering if I did something wrong setting up my server? I let it run using the forever command and when I tested it by visiting my website on my laptop and phone it seemed to work - I’m not sure why I’m getting these weird results! Anyone have any thoughts?