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Category: Blogging

a fun project that turned into a hobby sometimes

A short thought for the day

A short thought for the day

I have not been writing much this last couple of years. I cannot say there’s any particular reason for this lack of engagement. I enjoy the writing process, but I think life gets in the way. As I write this, it sounds like a rather pathetic excuse. But still, it now feels a little cathartic to admit that I am busy. Life is complex with the challenges of balancing family life and work, not to mention the whole COVID situation….

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Continuing to Improve a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Continuing to Improve a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Last month, I took action to correct the ultra-slow loading time of my blog.  I cleaned up the site and used a few plugins to improve the performance.  I went from a “D” score to a middle “B” according to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.  Most importantly, the load time according to Pingdom went from 13.6 seconds to 0.914 seconds. This is a huge improvement, and I am delighted by the results.  I covered the steps I went through in my March…

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When Asking for Help, Be Super Courteous

When Asking for Help, Be Super Courteous

This is common sense, but I do not see it frequent enough. When asking for help, be extremely courteous and polite to the person who provides the help. I know this is a shocking thought but bear with me for a moment. It is common for me to spend a significant amount of time in various technical forums. I do not believe in reinventing the wheel when it comes to resolving a problem. 95% of all technical issues are not…

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Improved Self-Hosted WordPress Performance

Improved Self-Hosted WordPress Performance

My self-hosted WordPress website was slow. Google Analytics Site Speed showed page load times fluctuating from 8 to over 15 seconds.  I know that anything over 2 seconds is bad and results in lower traffic and search engine referrals.  I have put up with this slowness for years, but now I need to address this problem.  I spent time with Google searching and reading about WordPress settings, plugins, content delivery networks (CDNs), and web host configurations that are designed to improve…

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