At the nook, we use cookies for analytical purposes.
We use a third party called Google Analytics to monitor traffic to the website. Google Analytics sets cookies on your browser which are used to understand how you found the website and what you do when you're here.
A cookie is a small piece of data that your browser stores. Historically these are small text files stored on your computer, and although that's loosely still true, they're often not actual files any longer but stored in the browsers storage.
A cookie is a very simple piece of text a website can use to store information on. The cookie persists between sessions (visits to the website), which makes them useful for uses like remembering if you're logged in or not.
Just analytics. Specifically we like to know where our traffic came from, how long a visitor spends on a page and on the website, what pages they visit when they're here and whether they come back.
This is all done through Google Analytics, an product from Google that shows us this information in an easy to use way.
Lots of reasons but mainly so that we can understand what content is performing well and what content isn't performing well. Content that brings traffic to us is probably more interesting to you, the reader, so that's what we want to write more of.
We use a service called Zaraz from a company called Cloudflare. Zaraz shows that cookie policy pop-up you see when you first visit the website. Accepting that pop-up will tell Zaraz you've accepted the cookies and loads Google Analytics. To save you being asked every time you look at a different page Zaraz stores a cookie that saves your preferences.
The framework we use to build the website also saves a cookie, but this isn't used for anything. In the future it might be used for favoriting articles and content. It isn't shared with anyone or anything, and it's empty.