Guides on Analytics, Development and Everyday Tools
Binary to Decimal: 3 Easy Methods Compared, Best Pick
Binary to decimal three ways: powers of two, double and add, and grouping by four. See worked examples, a decision table and when signed mode applies.
HMAC Signature: 8 Essential Rules for Safe Signing
An HMAC signature proves who sent a message and that it was not changed. Learn 8 exact rules, a lookup table and a checkable example to get it right.
Twitter Character Limit: 9 Smart Checks Before You Post
The Twitter character limit is 280, but links, emoji and some scripts count differently. Follow this playbook to check every post and thread in minutes.
Kg to Lbs by Role: 6 Real Uses With Exact Factors
Kg to lbs depends on who is asking. See six roles, from traveller to lifter to freight clerk, with the exact factor 2.20462, tables and worked examples.
Minify JavaScript: 9 Simple Rules for Best, Safe Output
Learn how to minify javascript without breaking it. Nine rules, a lookup table and real byte counts show what is safe to remove and what must stay.
Reverse Text: 5 Best Methods and Exact Limits to Know
Reverse text by characters, words, lines or letters in each word. See when a browser tool is enough, when code is better and where emoji break.
Calculate Age: 8 Simple Rules to Get It Exactly Right
Calculate age in years, months and days with 8 exact rules, four worked dates and a leap day guide, so your result matches the calendar every time.
7 Best Web Analytics Tools in 2026 (Privacy Friendly Picks)
Seven web analytics tools compared on privacy, price and ease of setup.
7 Best WordPress Analytics Plugins in 2026 (Free and Paid)
Seven WordPress analytics plugins compared on privacy, cost and what they actually show you.
ConvertDash: Cookieless Web Analytics That Counts Real Visitors
How ConvertDash counts real visitors without cookies and shows what it filtered out.
The reasoning that does not fit on a tool page
Every tool on ConvertNow answers one question in a second. This is where the longer answers live: why the number came out that way, what the format was designed for, and when the tool is the wrong thing to reach for.
A tool page has a job and that job is to get out of your way. It should load, take your input and give you an answer before you have finished reading the heading. What it cannot do is explain why a 20 percent discount followed by a 20 percent rise leaves you short, or why your hard drive shows 931 gigabytes when the box promised a terabyte, or why the same JSON file parses in one language and fails in another. Those answers need paragraphs.
So the writing here sits deliberately behind the tools rather than in front of them. Each post is anchored to a real task, usually one that somebody emailed about after losing an evening to it, and it links to the tool that does the job so you can test the idea on your own data while you read.
Twelve categories run in parallel with the tool library: developer topics, unit conversion, finance, text and content, image and design, dates and time, security, health and fitness, SEO and marketing, maths and numbers, files and documents, and networking. A handful of posts sit across several at once, which is usually a sign the topic is more interesting than its category.
There is no publishing schedule and no filler. Posts appear when there is something worth explaining, which in practice means most weeks.
What you will find here
- Explainers that go past the definition into why it works that way
- How to guides tied to a specific tool you can open alongside
- Comparisons run on one identical scenario, so the difference is visible
- Myth busters, for the advice that gets repeated and was never true
Questions about this blog
Who writes it, how topics are chosen and how the posts connect to the tools.
One person. Prateek Zare, an independent software developer based in Berlin, who also builds and maintains every tool on the site. There is no content team and nothing is outsourced, which is the main reason the posts stay tied to problems that actually came up rather than to a keyword list. More on the about page.
Mostly from email. Somebody describes an evening they lost to a problem, and if the explanation they needed does not exist anywhere decent, it becomes a post. The rest comes from questions that keep arriving about a specific tool, which usually means the tool page is not explaining itself well enough.
Not for most of them. Categories such as finance, health, dates and maths are written for anyone. Developer, security and network posts assume more, but each one states its assumptions at the top rather than letting you discover them halfway through.
They are drafted and edited by a human who has done the thing being described. Where a tool result or a code sample appears, it has been run rather than imagined, and where a standard is cited it has been read. That is the bar, and if a post ever falls short of it, tell us and it gets fixed.
Directly. Almost every post is anchored to one or more of the free tools, and links to them at the point where you would want to try the idea yourself. The tool gives you the answer, the post tells you whether the answer means what you think it means.
Short quotes with a link back are welcome and no permission is needed. For anything longer, or for translation or syndication, email [email protected] first. The tool output itself is a different matter and is entirely yours, with no attribution required.
Most weeks, without a fixed schedule. Existing posts also get corrected and updated when something changes, and a post that is materially out of date is either fixed or removed rather than left to quietly mislead people.