If I were a cat, my fur would be shooting off me in all directions. Did you know that when you have a website, if you want to track where your traffic is coming from, you can do that by adding extra bits of code onto the end of the link address?
Of course you did, it’s fully 2024 and this is not new.
What IS new, at least to me, is how that information is stored (a cookie) and how it’s passed to, say, Stripe, if someone buys something. Spoiler alert, it’s not. Unless you either set up another 3rd party thing (which costs money, which means raising your prices again to cover it, yuck no thanks) or else you build something yourself!
So that’s what I’m doing. With my handy Visual Studio Code, and GitHub, and — drumroll please for the new friend — Netflify! It’s got a free tier for those of us who would use it just occasionally. I’m not an affiliate of any of those. Yet. Maybe one day. I do like them.
I’ve been working on creating checkout sessions with Stripe that still pass the referral data along from the website. So the visitor comes, a cookie is made, and then if a button is pushed, a script in the footer says CATCH!! and passes some info on the button to Netlify and this code bit(ch) I’ve made with JavaScript and Json files and several newly gray hairs and yet another Secret Key, and that is what hands the cookie info off to Stripe.
People will do anything for a cookie. And apparently so will robots.
And Darcy cat will lick all across the tops of any cookies he comes across, so. Beware!
-Nikki
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
W.B. Yeats, 1919