Alright, let me tell you about this little thing I’ve been tinkering with, I call it “cookie the eagle”. It sounds a bit silly, maybe, but it came out of pure frustration, really.
You know how every single website nowadays throws those cookie banners in your face? Accept all, manage settings, blah blah blah. And the tracking ones? They follow you everywhere. Got tired of it. Really tired. Click click clicking away, or just feeling like someone’s watching over your shoulder online. I thought, there has to be a way I can just… manage this better, my way.
Starting the Hunt
So, I decided I’d try and build something myself. Wasn’t looking for anything fancy, just a little helper for me. First, I poked around thinking maybe I could just block stuff directly, maybe mess with browser files. That turned out to be messy, complicated real fast. Different browsers store things differently, and it felt like trying to perform surgery with a butter knife. Gave up on that idea pretty quick.
Then I thought, okay, what if I could automate the clicking? Or tell the browser exactly which cookies I absolutely didn’t want? I started messing around with some scripting. Played with Python for a bit, looked into browser automation tools. Stuff that lets you control a web browser with code. Seemed promising.
Building the Nest (and the Headaches)
Getting started wasn’t too bad. Found some guides, wrote some simple lines to open a browser, go to a site. The real pain began when I tried to actually find and deal with the cookies. Every site does it differently! Some hide the buttons, some use weird names for their tracking cookies. It was like detective work, honestly.
- I’d get something working for one site.
- Then try another, and it would completely fail.
- Then the first site would change its layout, and my script would break again.
Lots of trial and error. Spent hours just staring at website code, figuring out what ID or class name they used for that darn “reject” button or that specific tracking cookie I wanted gone. Debugging was a nightmare sometimes. Felt like I was fighting the websites themselves.
That’s kinda how the name came about. I felt like I was building this little script to be like an eagle, sharp eyes, swooping down to snatch up those pesky little cookies I didn’t want. So, “cookie the eagle” it became.
Where It’s At Now
So, what did I end up with? It’s basically a script I run myself. It’s not a polished app or anything. It targets a few specific websites that annoyed me the most. It opens them up, tries to automatically decline the worst tracking cookies, or clears out specific ones after I visit. It’s clumsy. It breaks. I have to update it when sites change.
But, it’s my clumsy thing. It does a small job that makes my browsing feel a tiny bit cleaner, a bit more under my control. It’s not perfect, probably never will be. Websites are always changing. But going through the process, wrestling with the code, making it do something useful for me? That felt pretty good. Learned a lot about how websites work behind the scenes, even if it was frustrating as heck sometimes.
So yeah, that’s the story of “cookie the eagle”. Just a little personal project born from being annoyed online. Maybe I’ll poke at it some more later, maybe not. We’ll see.
