Plausible

How to Scope a Next.js Project Before Coding

This guide outlines five essential things to define before starting a Next.js project to avoid budget and timeline overruns: a complete page inventory, an explicit CMS decision, a detailed list of third-party integrations, a performance budget, and a timeline with task-level estimates. The author recommends capturing every URL and render strategy, confirming CMS choice (Sanity is suggested as a default with GROQ noted), naming owners for each integration (analytics, forms, search, auth, video, e‑commerce, consent), and setting Core Web Vitals and bundle size targets. The post also gives per-task time estimates and example total durations for common configurations (e.g., a 12-page marketing site with Sanity, SendGrid, and GA4 typically 4–6 weeks).

Wirecookies: GDPR Cookie Consent for Laravel

Wirecookies is an open-source Laravel package that provides a cookie consent banner, preferences modal, and a simple consent gate via a localStorage object and a DOM event. The package stores user choices in a 'cookie-preferences' localStorage key (categories such as essential, analytics, marketing, functional), and dispatches a bubbling 'wirecookies-saved' event with the preferences as its detail. Wirecookies has no proprietary JS of its own and relies on the companion wiremodal package for modal behavior. Categories and policy URL are configurable via published config/wirecookies.php, and the package is installable via Composer.

Why Most SaaS Analytics Dashboards Fail Users

This article argues that many SaaS analytics dashboards undermine activation and retention by overwhelming users, lacking narrative/context, showing poor empty states, and failing to link insights to action. It cites benchmarks (Userpilot: 37.5% activation; Nielsen Norman Group: ~2.3 seconds scan time) and profiles four bootstrapped companies (Plausible, Fathom, Baremetrics, ConvertKit) that prioritize clarity: one clear hero metric, limited primary metrics, designed empty states, and actionable links from insight to task. The piece gives seven actionable takeaways for founders to improve dashboards, including choosing a north-star metric, removing unused metrics, adding comparisons/trends, designing empty states, showing data freshness, and surfacing next steps from analytics.