Development
Remember Do Not Track? Neither do publishers. The little HTTP header that could—DNT for short—promised users a way to wave off trackers with a polite “no thanks.” It flopped hard. Websites ignored it, ad tech laughed it off, and by 2019, it was a digital relic. Enter Global Privacy Control (GPC), the shiny new signal touted as DNT’s successor. Backed by California’s privacy law, it’s supposed to force publishers to respect your opt-out. Sounds great, right? Here’s the catch: GPC has no more bite than DNT ever did. Publishers can sidestep it by simply doing business outside California’s reach—and they will. History says so - Google did it.
So I did a bunch of work I donated to a political candidate and (at the time) frequent media guest commentator, and this is a product of that work.
They've kept it quiet - but it happened. The Joomla core developers released Joomla! 4.0.0 Beta 1 - very very quietly. I only noticed because I was looking over the update XML file for the alpha 12 version - and there it was.
This may seem like a personal attack on the browser, but really, my hatred for IE has nothing to do with it. Maybe I get a little joy from this, but I'll try to keep that to myself.
I've been tracking some bad reviews in the JED for one of my more popular extensions. What I'm finding is very unfortunate, because there isn't much I can do about it other than beg people to stop. Apparently, people are creating non-forks of my extensions and then leaving them online to become stale, or are linking to the download destination of specific versions of my extensions. I don't know if this is malicious, or if they're just oblivious to the consequences of their actions. Of course, they would be oblivious - they aren't the ones feeling the consequences.
I've been deep into GDPR compliance extensions for Joomla recently, and while setting up a demo site I realized that compliance meant I had to give up Google Analytics. Anyone who runs a website knows this is unacceptable. Sure, there are other ways to obtain the information, but Google has really built a fantastic tool to monitor all sorts of data, not just about the visitors - but also traffic sources, time spent on specific pages, browser capabilities, and gobs more information.
I've spent several days troubleshooting issues for people who downloaded my free extensions. In every case, the issue was caused by their bad decisions and poor implementations.