We asked one of our developers to write an explanation of how cookies work, what they do and why we need them on our site. And then we tried to read it. We didn’t have a scooby what it all meant. So I got the job of translating it.
Cookies help our site run. They help us understand how you are using it, and if there is anything not working the way we want it to. They allow us to store some information about you – so if you make preference choices (like your country) on the site, then we’ll remember that for a while.
They also let us pop up in other places you visit. Mainly websites and social feeds. But that involves us giving big bags of money to other people. And we don’t really roll that way. We love tech. We believe tech can do amazing things. So we’ll treat you the way we’d like to be treated. Do no evil and all that.
We like cookies. Chocolate chip. Peanut butter. Amaretti. Cookies are also text files placed on your computer to process standard internet logs. They make our website work better and let us track traffic trends and behaviours. If you are really interested we’ve written a whole cookie policy here. Have a read. There’s an Easter Egg at the end. If you make it that far.
That said, if you are really (really) interested… the key cookies on our site are:
Google Analytics – this shows us how many people visit our website, which pages they visit, how they interact with those pages. And whether the 3000 daily visits from Uruguay suggests we need to set up a new office in Montevideo… complete with maté bar.
Doubleclick – more Google stuff. Ever noticed how after you’ve searched for something, you see promoted results for it around the web? Doubleclick does that. But we’d rather spend the petty cash on chocolate and coffee so you probably won’t see us following you around so much…
We have loads of other Google cookies that all sort of do the same thing, but in different ways or on different platforms. They all have really catchy names… 1P_JAR, ANID, APISID, CONSENT, HSID, NID, OGPC, SAPISID, SID, SSID, Secure-3PAPISID, Secure-3PSID. I could go through each one individually and tell you what they do… but no-one really reads these things, and if you are interested, you’ve probably already googled it.
Pixels - Ok, stay with me here – a pixel is different to a cookie, but it pretty much does the same thing in a different way. We have pixels on our site primarily to allow us to work with Facebook and LinkedIn. So if we write an absolutely mind-blowing article on LinkedIn, we can see how many people read it and decide they desperately want to work with us. Or we could depressingly discover that our clickbait post ‘5 ways a cat can wreck your home working space’ is actually marketing gold, at which point I’m planning on going off into a corner to sob gently and try to work out why I did that Eng Lit degree.
Ingredients:
200g peanut butter (you can use smooth… but why would you do that, crunchy crunchy goodness is better)
175g caster sugar
1 large egg
¼ tsp salt (though depending on your choice of peanut butter you might not need this!)
Baking instructions: