Kind-of-Lost

The Client Who Changed His Mind (And Why I Finished the Job Anyway)

Years ago, I was doing gigs on Fiverr. Mostly Excel work — macros, pivot tables, solver models. I had a profile and a handful of listings, and I’d written about that whole love/hate experience back in 2017 (short version: the clients who treat you like a vending machine are the price you pay for the ones who bring you genuinely interesting problems). One day, a genuinely interesting problem showed up.

A training company needed help scheduling their staff. Multiple clients, multiple courses, multiple instructors, limited hours, shared equipment, weird simultaneous constraints. Classic Operations Research territory. I said yes.

Continue reading “The Client Who Changed His Mind (And Why I Finished the Job Anyway)”

WordPress Optimization Results: Before, After, and What’s Still Left

This is the final post in a six-part series documenting a full technical overhaul of this site — kindoflost.com — using Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. If you’ve followed along from Post 1, you’ve seen every fix in detail. This post is the recap: what the site looked like before, what it looks like now, what we’d do differently, and what’s still on the to-do list.

WooCommerce Caching, Checkout, and Cart Fixes That Actually Work

WooCommerce adds a layer of complexity to WordPress caching and performance that trips up a lot of site owners. The problem is that WooCommerce pages — cart, checkout, account — are dynamic by nature. They show different content to different users. Cache them aggressively and you get customers seeing each other’s cart items. Don’t cache at all and your site crawls. Getting the balance right requires specific configuration at every layer of your stack.

Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like

If you’ve been following the WordPress optimization series on this blog, you already know this site has been through some changes lately. We fixed security holes, set up Cloudflare properly, got caching working, cleaned up WooCommerce — the whole thing. That series documented every step of turning a quietly broken site into something that actually works the way it should.

This post isn’t part of that series. Think of it as what came after. Continue reading “Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like”

How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting

Site speed matters more than most small site owners realize. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, which means a slow site is actively hurting your search visibility — not just annoying your visitors. For a WooCommerce site, it’s even more direct: a sluggish checkout experience costs real sales.

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