Stripe Climate and Plausible Analytics

Climate change is something I care deeply about. I spend a lot of time ensuring that I have the smallest possible impact on the climate that I can and do what I can to try and influence those around me to do the same. When Stipe launched their Climate programme I jumped at the opportunity to take part!

So what is Stripe Climate? It is an initiative where businesses who use Stripe to process their payments can donate a percentage of sales to help scrub carbon from the atmosphere. Going forward, 2% of all sales on WeCode NI will go towards carbon sequestration. I will also be backdating this contribution to March 2018 when WeCode NI launched!

Learn more about Stripe Climate

Online privacy is another thing I care deeply about. Over the last few months, I've been working on WeCode NI to ensure that to the best of my ability, this website reflects that value. Previously, authentication and data storage was handled by Google, a company with a patchy history when it comes to user privacy. I didn't like the fact that my user data was held by Google, so I did the work necessary to move all of this to a Postgres database that I own.

The next major update was to my analytics provider. I'm not keen on the idea of tracking the visitors that come to WeCode NI, but I do need some data on how the site performs to help me improve it and to make sure I'm providing the best service I can to employers. Previously, I used Google Analytics for this and as mentioned above, I don't love the idea of Google tracking the visitors to WeCode NI. After some research, I switched to Plausible Analytics. Plausible is a privacy focused analytics company that does not sell user data, or track users across websites. They also don't use cookies to track users, which meant I could get rid of the cookie notice!

One of my favourite features of Plausible is that it allows me to share my site analytics with everyone. If you're interested in the kind of traffic that WeCode NI gets, you can now check it out here! Over the coming months, I'll be doing more to integrate this data with the website more and exposing more useful metrics to employers that post jobs.