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Tag: Blogging

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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Goals are not a Panacea for Achievement

Goals are not a Panacea for Achievement

I have been a strong advocate of S.M.A.R.T. goals.  This method has significant appeal for annual bonus planning and assessing performance achievement.  However, being goal driven in all aspects of your life can be detrimental. What I have begun to understand is that goals always leave me feeling like I am chasing a long-sought reward that never seems to be within my reach.  By moving the objective as soon as I get meaningfully close, I convince myself that striving for…

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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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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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