Privacy Policy

The alvinalexander.com website is owned and operated by Valley Programming, LLC, of Simpsonville, Kentucky (valleyprogramming.com). This page describes the Privacy Policy for the alvinalexander.com website. Please see the Terms and Conditions page for additional information.

Basic statement

In regards to AlvinAlexander.com (formerly known as devdaily.com), we don’t attempt to track you in any way, shape, or form. In general we’re just glad you came to visit, and hope you’ll come back again. Basic Nginx and Apache log files are kept on our servers for 30 days. We only look at them if we think there is something suspicious going on.

That being said, we do use advertising partners who have different policies, so please read on for their details.

Cookies and data

Cookies

As of March 22, 2020, this website no longer uses cookies. Except for the “book ads,” which are created with JavaScript, all of the pages that you see are statically generated, meaning that they are plain text files on the server. But to be clear, the alvinalexander.com website does not use cookies. When you look at a web page, it’s just like looking at a file on a hard drive. (Please see the “caveats” section below for our partners, who do use cookies.)

(The site previously used cookies because the Drupal CMS needed them for some reason, but this site no longer uses Drupal.)

Data

The static files just mentioned are served by a web server, and that server writes log files when people access web pages. As mentioned previously, the only times we ever look at those log files are when we’re trying to resolve a technical problem on the website. Historically, that means that we look at those files maybe ten times a year, probably less, and again, it’s only to troubleshoot problems and suspicious activity (people attempting to hack the website).

Mailing list

If you sign up for the alvinalexander.com mailing list, that is used to tell people about website updates, and also to let them know if they’ve won a prize in one of our contests. That being said, as of February, 2021, we have not used a mailing list in several years, maybe five years or more.

Three “tracking” caveats

Now, beyond what is “tracked” by alvinalexander.com, which is basically the nothingness described above, there are three caveats that need to be shared.

Caveat 1: Google Analytics

The first caveat to share is that this site uses Google Analytics. It’s generally just used to understand aggregate traffic flow, particularly which pages are most popular. If you can imagine owning a website like this, if we’re writing about certain topics and nobody cares about those topics — old topics like JFS, JBuilder, etc. — well, from an income standpoint we’re wasting our time. So we use Google Analytics as a tool to see what pages are popular (or not popular).

Caveat 2: Advertisers

The second caveat is that other companies are allowed to place advertisements on this website. The ads may come from Google AdSense, Amazon’s Affiliate Program, and a company called Commission Junction. Both AdSense and Commission Junction serve ads on behalf of their customers. Please see their websites for their privacy policies.

Caveat 3: Links to Amazon

A final caveat is that when we link to products on Amazon, we use their “Affiliate” tools to create the links. The way this works is that by being an “Amazon affiliate,” when we look at a product on amazon.com they have a little tool that makes it easy for us to create a shortened link to that product page. We then use that link on this website, and if someone clicks on the link and buys that product on Amazon, we get paid a small amount for “referring” that person to Amazon.

Specifically in regards to links to Amazon.com, Amazon requires that we state, “As an Amazon Associate I (Valley Programming, LLC) earn from qualifying purchases.”