What this site records about a visit, and why.
Phogen keeps a simple log of how its pages are read, so that I can see which of the problems written up here are actually being read and which are not. That is the whole purpose. Nothing here is sold, shared for advertising, or handed to an analytics company.
What is recorded when a page opens
- The page itself, and the site you came from, if your browser says.
- Your country, region and city, worked out from your network address.
- The kind of network you are on and its provider.
- Whether you are on a phone, tablet or desktop; the operating system and browser family; your language setting; screen and window size; whether you prefer dark mode or reduced motion.
- If you opened the link inside an app such as Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, the app's built-in browser names the app, and some apps also report the exact device model and the app's language setting. Those are recorded as the app sends them.
- How long the page took to load, and the connection type your browser reports.
What is recorded when you leave a page
- How long the page was in front of you.
- How far down it you scrolled.
- Which part of the page was on screen longest, by the nearest heading above it. That is how I learn which of the problems written up here are actually read.
- Which of the folded sections you opened.
- Whether you used the LinkedIn button.
Your network address
- It is used once, to work out the country and city, and is then cut short before anything is stored: the last part of an IPv4 address is dropped, and an IPv6 address is kept to its first half. What is stored says which network a visit came from. It does not say which machine.
- Alongside it, a scrambled form of the full address is kept, made with a secret that stays on the server, so that it cannot be turned back into the address. It is used for one thing: to leave my own visits out of the figures, including ones already recorded.
What is kept in your browser
- A small note in your browser's storage, not a cookie, holding a random visit code that expires after thirty minutes without activity, a count of your visits, and the date of the first one. It is what lets a run of pages be read as one visit, and lets a return visit be seen as one. No lasting visitor identifier is ever sent to the server.
- If you would rather not be counted at all, block site storage for phogen.com in your browser settings. If you are comfortable with the browser console, setting the key phogen_ignore in local storage to any value does the same.
Where it goes and how long it stays
- The log is written to a database on the server that hosts this site, outside the part of it that the web can reach, and is read through a private page on the same server that only I can open. Nothing is sent to any other company.
- Rows are deleted automatically after twelve months.
A one-line reading of each visit
From those same fields, and nothing else, the private page writes one plain sentence per page view: roughly where the visit came from and on what kind of network, the device, the local time of day, how the page was read, and whether the browser's clock agrees with the network's location. Where that is a guess, the wording says so. Age, gender and identity are not in the data and are not guessed at.
Automated visits
Visits from known crawlers and tools are not recorded at all: the identity string is checked against an openly maintained list of them. The network address is checked, at the moment of the visit, against open lists of datacenter and VPN address ranges, and the verdict, not the address, is kept, so that automated traffic can be told apart from people in the figures.
What is not done
No third-party analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels from anyone else, no cookies, no fingerprinting of your browser, and no attempt to work out who you are.
Your rights, and who is responsible
I am the person responsible for this data. Because the address is cut short before it is stored, I generally cannot tell which rows belong to a particular person, and so cannot single yours out to show or delete them; if you believe that is not so in your case, the way to reach me is the LinkedIn link at the foot of every page, which is the single route in to this site on purpose.
This page was last updated on 29 September 2026, when the log was extended to record time on page, scroll depth and opened sections, when the network address began to be stored cut short rather than in full, and when the copy that used to go to a Google Sheet stopped.