A backup in the web root is a source leak
Before editing a large file, the natural move is to copy it first. cp index.php index.php.vor-aenderung, then work. If that file sits in the directory the web server publishes, the entire…
New privacy policy, terms and DPA
As of 19 August 2026, stats4u.net has three legal documents where it used to have one: a rewritten privacy policy, a terms of service, and — new — a data processing agreement (DPA) under…
A language code that looked like Perl
On 19 August 2026 we added a rule to .htaccess blocking a class of file that should never be served directly to a browser: leftover source-code copies sitting in the web root after an edit…
Compressing the same file every time
Apache compresses responses on the fly. For a page that is different every time, that is the only option. For a stylesheet that changes once a month, it means the server does the same work…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
Building a site means opening it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are the author. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own…
A page address longer than its column
On 9 August 2026, twenty counter images failed to render. Not drew wrong, not drew slowly — the visitor got nothing at all where a counter should have been. The cause was a page address…
What came off the about page, and why
The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list line by line against the software, and four entries no longer matched it. One of them had not…
Where the about page numbers come from
There are six numbers across the top of the about page now: people online right now, visitors yesterday, counters in use, countries in the last thirty days, designs to choose from, and the…
The header and footer now run full width
A small change visible on every page here: the dark band at the top and the footer at the bottom now run the full width of the window. Until today they sat inside the same 1180-pixel column…
The number on the badge is not visitors
A recurring question here is why the number printed on the counter image does not match the number in the statistics. Both are correct. They are answers to different questions, and the…
How to read the referrer list
The referrer list is the part of the statistics that looks the most like insight and misleads the most reliably. It is a list of the places people came from. Reading it correctly takes…
Exporting the data as CSV or JSON
There is a link on the statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. Both hand the numbers over as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a download…