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Guides & explainers

Plain-English guides on analytics, marketing, data formats and developer tools.

All Data Formats Developer Tools Marketing Web Analytics

Data Formats 5 min read

You want to write something for the web — a README file, a blog post, some documentation. Should you write…

Jan van Dijk · Jun 5, 2026

Developer Tools 5 min read

Regular expressions — regex for short — look like someone fell asleep on the keyboard. ^\d{3}-\d{4}$ isn’t exactly inviting. But…

Jan van Dijk · May 18, 2026

ASCII 4 min read

Have you ever copied a link and noticed it was full of strange codes like %20, %3D, or %26? Maybe…

Jan van Dijk · Apr 29, 2026

CSV 5 min read

You’ve been handed a data file. It might be a list of customers, a product catalog, or an export from…

Jan van Dijk · Apr 11, 2026

Campaign Tracking 8 min read

A few years ago, a small e-commerce client asked me: “We’re spending €2,000 a month on ads. Is it working?”…

Jan van Dijk · Apr 4, 2026

Cookies 7 min read

When Google announced it would phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, I got calls from three clients the same week…

Jan van Dijk · Mar 31, 2026

Compliance 7 min read

If you’ve browsed the internet in the last few years, you’ve seen them — those pop-ups asking you to “accept…

Jan van Dijk · Mar 25, 2026

Compliance 8 min read

As a Dutch web analyst, GDPR is something I deal with every single day. When the regulation came into effect…

Jan van Dijk · Mar 19, 2026

analytics-basics 8 min read

I remember the first time a client showed me their GA4 dashboard and asked, “so what does all this mean?”…

Jan van Dijk · Mar 14, 2026

analytics-basics 7 min read

When I first started looking at analytics data, the difference between sessions vs users confused me for weeks. A single…

Jan van Dijk · Mar 8, 2026