Notes on the WordPress admin colour schemes
Eight schemes ship with WordPress and plugin authors mostly test against one of them, which is why so many admin screens look slightly broken.
Read it Notes on the WordPress admin colour schemesNotes
Shorter thoughts, published as they happen.
The cost of an analytics request
Third-party analytics is rarely one request. It is a DNS lookup, a TLS handshake, a redirect and a script that fetches another script.
Read it The cost of an analytics requestA funnel is a question, not a report
Funnels built to be admired have seven steps. Funnels that change anything have three, and somebody is waiting on the answer.
Read it A funnel is a question, not a reportServer-side counting on a fully cached site
When every page is served from disk, the only thing that reliably sees a request is the thing serving it.
Read it Server-side counting on a fully cached siteThe case against storing referrer URLs
The hostname tells you where traffic comes from. The full URL tells you that, plus a pile of things you did not ask for and cannot safely keep.
Read it The case against storing referrer URLsCounting cached pages without breaking the cache
A cached page never reaches PHP, which is exactly why so many analytics quietly stop counting once you turn caching on.
Read it Counting cached pages without breaking the cache