Proxied Third-Party JavaScript – CodePen
Chris and Stephen hop on the podcast to discuss the concept of a proxy. Possibly the most “gray hat” thing that CodePen does. We use a third-party analytics tool called Fullres. We could just put a link to the necessary to make that work directly to fullres.com, but being an analytics tool, it’s blocked by a ton of ad blocking browsers and browser extensions. We made the conscious choice to have that point to a codepen.io URL instead (a proxy) so that we get (much) more accurate usage data on the app. Since there is nothing tracked that is an anonymity concern, and we do nothing with the data other than help inform ourselves on how to make a better app, we wear this gray hat.
If you’d still like to block these requests, the path would be
Time Jumps
- 00:06 Proxies are my passion
- 00:57 Grey hat, white hat, or black hat
- 02:39 Small emoji and icons
- 04:45 Browsers and ad blockers
- 07:29 Where the grey hat part comes in
- 12:34 Why do ad blockers matter to us?
- 25:31 Podcast download tracking bug
- 26:49 New editor updates
