For all who haven't found it yet, Safari 5.1 has given us a new toy...Prefs > Privacy > Cookies and other website data > Details that displays all sorts of horrifying info about who's watching us.

The items I see are identified as "Cookies," "Plug-ins," or "Cache," and one consistent one has been "obsidianfileds.com" (Cache), about which I was mystified until I visited Obsidian Fields: About Us and found:


Questions for tacit:

1. What is it?
2. What is it doing?
3. Why is it in cache?

And a further, general, question about the many items I see identified as "Cache..." What are they, and how do they differ from cookies?

Perhaps the thread Woohoo! We're on Apple's Web site! can help demystify those obsidian fields.

We also discussed tacit's Obsidian Fields at least once back in the MFI forums.

I have such a file saved on my hd now: "Anyone heard of MacSweeper.com/ Internet Related/ MacFixItForums.html"

But I vaguely recall another thread in which i posted about it. [and i'm not in that MacSweeper.com thread.]

You should see cached entries for any site you've browsed to and not emptied the cache. I'm not currently using any cookie data for Obsidian Fields directly, though I used to have an ecommerce site there (it's now living on franklinveaux.com and I haven't touched obsidianfields.com in years)--that cookie was used by ZenCart, the open-source ecommerce software I use.

I no longer use the obsidianfields.com Web site itself for anything; I haven't even updated it to show that I've moved to Portland. Back in the day, it was the center for my consultant business. These days, what I mostly use it for is the repository for the images I place in my blog posts. If you visit my blog at tacit.livejournal.com all the images you see are actually hosted at obsidianfields.com and loaded with an IMG tag, since I have unlimited bandwidth at obsidianfields.com, so cached pictures used in my blog will be reported by cache management software to have come from obsidianfields.com.

At some point I need to completely rebuild obsidianfileds.com (and franklinveaux.com, for that matter).

On the one hand, thanks for the link; I've never so much as looked at Dashboard...haven't got a single widget residing on my deuced Mac(hina), and I ignored that thread other than to take note of the FTM widget's existence.

On the other hand, though, the widget doesn't seem to be of consequence as respects my post, because the obsidianfields.com (Cache) item appears only when I visit a page on which tacit has posted.

> You should see cached entries for any site you've browsed to and not emptied the cache.

Thanks for explaining that; I've never fully understood what goes into cache, but I'll now try to be more cognizant of it.

Safari's "Privacy" pane has spawned more questions in my head than it's answered, so along with clearing cookies neurotically frequently I now clear Safari's cache too.

Back to the obsidianfields.com (Cache) item, though, which appears only after I visit a page on which you've posted, and, therefore, appears to have nothing to do with the FTM widget; I'm wondering if it maybe has something to do with your avatars, similar to what was discussed here.

I think you're right: it's tacit's avatar (http://obsidianfields.com/randomimages/specific_image_name.jpg) which is being cached.

Bingo! Got it in one. I'd forgotten my avatars were being remote-loaded from there. Yep, when the avatar is cached, a cache management program will show the cached file as belonging to obsidianfields.com.

As the placer of the obsidianfields.com cache in Safari > Prefs > Privacy > Cookies... > Details, I'm hoping you'll be able to either confirm or correct the conclusion I've drawn in this post.

Thanks.

Yep! You got it exactly right.