ShellSanibel
Read the beach.
What this site measures, what leaves your browser, and how the gear links work. No accounts, no sign-up, no mailing list, no comments and no contact form — there is nowhere here to type your name.
This site sets no cookies, first-party or third-party, and writes nothing to your device. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
From 21 to 23 August 2026 this site carried a small script from
/.netlify/scripts/rum, served by our host Netlify, which
measured how fast pages loaded and posted what it measured to
ingesteer.services-prod.nsvcs.net — a Netlify address on another domain,
carrying your IP as any request does.
It was switched off on 23 August 2026 and is no longer in the page. Unlike some of our other sites, nothing here blocked it while it was present, so for those three days that did happen and saying otherwise would be rewriting it. It never stored anything on your device and never read the page you came from.
Page views are still counted, and always were, but not by a script: Netlify reads its own server logs — the ordinary record of which addresses asked for which pages, which every web server keeps. Nothing runs in your browser to make that happen.
Until 23 August 2026 the fonts on this site — Newsreader for headings and
shell names, Inter for everything else — were served by Google from
fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. Your
browser fetched them on every page, so Google received your IP address and
user-agent for every visit here whether or not you clicked anything. This
page called that the largest privacy cost on the site, and it was.
They are now served from this domain. The files are cut down to only the characters these pages actually use and named after their own contents, so your browser fetches them once and keeps them. Nothing about the type reaches anyone else, and the page is lighter for it — about 61 KB of font where it used to be roughly 180 KB.
Recorded rather than quietly swapped, because a privacy page that only ever describes the present tense is a page you cannot check.
Beyond what is described above: nothing. No third-party analytics, no advertising, no retargeting, no data brokers, no chat widget, no social embeds, no iframes, no maps, and no images from any other domain. Every page was fetched and checked. Tides, wind and red tide are read at build time on our server and baked into the page, so your browser never contacts NOAA, FWC or the National Weather Service — which is also why the site works with JavaScript off.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The gear page carries links to Amazon under our own Associates tag,
shellsanibel-20. If you buy something after following one,
Amazon pays us a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.
Practically, that means:
rel="sponsored" in
the markup, and the disclosure appears above the first one on the page
rather than below the last.It does not decide what is recommended. The gear page ranks things by whether they help on a Sanibel beach, and the advice on it was written before any link was attached to it. No brand has paid for placement, no item is there because it pays more than another, and nothing on this site is sponsored.
Where we have picked a specific product — 21 of 24 items so far — the reason it was chosen is on the gear page beside it, and it was chosen for whether it works on this beach before anyone looked at what it pays. The remaining 3 are still Amazon searches rather than picks.
Every other outbound link here — beaches, the shell museum, FWC, the City of Sanibel, the sister sites — is editorial and earns nothing.
Hosted by Netlify. Like any host, their servers record standard request information — IP address, timestamp, page requested, user agent — for delivery, security and abuse prevention. We build no profiles from it.
This site is aimed at adults walking a beach. It is not directed at children and knowingly collects information from nobody.
If what the site does changes — a form, a mailing list, another affiliate programme, a sponsored placement — this page is updated before it goes live and the date below changes with it. A privacy page that quietly falls out of date is worse than none, and that has already happened once on a sister site.
Claims on this page were last checked against the served live pages on 23 August 2026. There is no longer a measurement script to read.