WordPress paranoia
I was a little surprised to see in my inbox an email entitled Your 2014 year in blogging [petersmith.org]. On reading the email, its a summary of activity on my (now former) WordPress blog. Given that I was self-hosting that site (i.e., I had installed WordPress on my own server), I was taken aback that WordPress seemed to have been reading my 'data'.
Actually, it's not clear if the email is really coming from WordPress or from Jetpack. Then again, a quick Google reveals that Jetpack is produced by WordPress. So, either way, it came from WordPress.
I never realised that my stats were being harvested by WordPress. Indeed, I should expect that any online service I'm using (e.g., Dailymile) is harvesting my data. But, as I said, I had a stand-alone WordPress installation.
Part of the purpose of the email (and the report that comes with it), seems to be the encouragement of bloggers to blog more. A quick skim of posts (again through Google) indicates that this particular email campaign is successful. There are plenty of bloggers saying they will be blogging more … or as one person said #KeepOnBlogging.
All in all, this event makes me feel more comfortable about my switch to Pelican for my blogs. I pretty sure that my stats won't be being fed back to any central Python repository :)