My WordPress Site Was a Mess. Here’s How I Found Out.

If you run a small WordPress site and haven’t thought much about optimization, security, or caching — this series is for you. A few weeks ago I used Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic, to do a full technical review of this very site — the one you’re reading right now. Claude walked me through every problem it found and every fix in real time, while I made the changes directly in my dashboards. What we uncovered was not great — but the process turned out to be genuinely useful, so I’m documenting every step here so you can do the same thing on your own site.

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Shadow price in linear programming

Linear programming is a mathematical method that is used to optimize the allocation of resources. It can be applied to a wide range of problems, such as maximizing profits or minimizing costs. One of the key concepts in linear programming is the shadow price, which can be used to determine how a change in one of the constraints of a linear programming problem affects the optimal solution.

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What is mathematical programming

Mathematical programming is a field of mathematics that deals with the optimization of complex systems and processes. It has a rich history that dates back to the 1940s when George Dantzig, an American mathematician, developed the simplex method for solving linear programming problems. Since then, it has grown into a vast and dynamic discipline that has found applications in various fields such as finance, transportation, engineering, and operations research.

In this blog post, I will explore the origins of mathematical programming, provide an example of a problem that can be tackled and list some classical problems. I will also discuss some of the software products used in mathematical programming, both open-source and commercial.

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How I Solved the Shortest Superstring Problem in Excel

A while back I wrote an introduction to the shortest superstring problem and promised two follow-ups: one showing the greedy algorithm I wrote in VBA, and another showing how I bolted optimization on top to do better than greedy alone. Then I did what I usually do with “future work” and let it sit. Here, finally, is that follow-up — the whole thing in one post, because this is really the story of how I solved the shortest superstring problem in Excel with two stages of the same machine: a VBA pass that generates candidates, and an optimization model that picks the best of them.

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The shortest superstring problem

I was introduced to the shortest superstring problem by a request I got on Fiverr. The request turned out to be a waste of time but I really enjoyed learning about it.

Problem statement

The shortest common superstring problem aims to find a string with a minimal length that contains every string in a given set.

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