Tag: analytics

ua-tracer is a tiny site that attempts to show you what a user agent fetches, follows, and executes when it loads a page. I built it because we have almost no visibility into what bots and AI agents actually see when they crawl the web.

Curious who's visiting my site, I built a user-agent tracker with Vercel middleware and KV storage. It admits up to 100 new user agents a minute and keeps a 60-second count for each, then shows a live table of a sample of up to 100 recently admitted agents, refreshing every minute. Code on GitHub!

My QRCode scanner app in China ran into an issue offline: the camera wouldn't start due to a Google Analytics request hanging in the onload event. This highlighted a broader problem of render-blocking third-party assets. If these assets (like scripts) are critical, a slow or failed connection can prevent the page from rendering for over a minute while the browser waits for a timeout. This results in a blank screen for the user. This post explores the impact of render-blocking third-party resources on performance and how optimizing their integration can drastically improve the user experience, particularly in unreliable network conditions.