Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
The app was working. On my laptop. Which is the same as not working, for most purposes.
If the goal was to keep it to myself — test it occasionally, tinker with it, update the model when I felt like it — a working local copy would be enough. But that’s not what I built it for. The point of converting these models to web apps is that they can run anywhere, for anyone, without requiring someone to have Python installed and know how to use a terminal.
So: deployment.
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.
Continue reading “WordPress Optimization Results: Before, After, and What’s Still Left”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.
Continue reading “WooCommerce Caching, Checkout, and Cart Fixes That Actually Work”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”
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.
Continue reading “How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting”
