Guide
Add SMS appointment reminders to your WordPress site
Automatic text reminders before every booking, sent from WordPress. The plugins that do it, what a text costs, and Australia's new sender name rules.
3 min read
Field notes
Journal
Notes from the Riksi studio in Melbourne. Plain guides on WordPress, Shopify, front-end code, speed and the tools I use every day.
Guide
Add SMS appointment reminders to your WordPress site
Automatic text reminders before every booking, sent from WordPress. The plugins that do it, what a text costs, and Australia's new sender name rules.
3 min read
Guide
Win back abandoned carts with automatic emails
Automatic emails that bring shoppers back to the cart they left, set up in Shopify or WooCommerce, and sent the way Australia's Spam Act expects.
4 min read
Guide
Is your website out of date? A 10-minute check
A 10-minute check you can do yourself: your WordPress, PHP and plugin versions, or your Shopify theme and checkout, and what to fix first.
4 min read
Trick
Check redirects and headers from the terminal with curl
Follow a redirect chain, check a status code, time a page and test a whole list of old URLs with curl. Each one takes a single line.
3 min read
Dev log
Core Web Vitals in plain English: LCP, INP and CLS
What the three Core Web Vitals measure, the numbers that count as good, how to measure them on real visitors, and the fixes that help most on WordPress sites.
5 min read
Dev log
Security headers for WordPress, without a plugin
Five HTTP headers that close common holes in a WordPress site. The few lines of PHP I use to send them, and how to check they work.
4 min read
Dev log
WCAG 2.2: the nine new success criteria and how to meet them
WCAG 2.2 added nine new rules and removed one. Here is what each new rule asks for, which ones count at level AA, and the code I use to meet them.
6 min read
Dev log
How AI search finds your site: crawlers, robots.txt and llms.txt
AI answers start with a crawler. I explain which bots fetch your pages, which ones train models, and how I let AI search in without giving away content.
5 min read
Diary
Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi
Put Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with Raspberry Pi Imager, boot it on Ethernet, finish setup at homeassistant.local:8123 and turn on backups.
4 min read
Dev log
Fix the Shopify app ERR_INVALID_ARG_TYPE “key” error
The "key argument must be of type string... Received undefined" error in a Shopify app means your API secret isn't loaded. I explain why, and how to fix it.
4 min read