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Dev

Technical notes on WordPress, Shopify, PHP, JavaScript and the other tools I build with every day.

A huge gold picture frame stuck in a narrow front door, with a small yellow parcel waiting on the doorstep

Dev log Performance Faster images, faster site: every trick, with examples Resize your images, save them as WebP or AVIF, lazy-load everything below the first screen, and let a CDN and caching deliver them. Here's how to do each one. October 18, 2026 10 min read

A wooden ruler with small paper flags clipped along it, three stacked at the top, one big lime flag below them and two waiting near the bottom

Dev log CSS Build a scroll ruler sidebar with letter-by-letter titles Section titles that ride a ruler and swing into place one letter at a time, rebuilt from the ArtCraft site with CSS and a short script. October 13, 2026 10 min read

Paper signposts around a small shop, all pointing to its one lime-green door

Dev log SEO & AI search Canonical URLs: fix duplicate pages for better SEO When one page opens at several addresses, a canonical tag tells Google which one is real. Here's how to set it up and test it on WordPress and Shopify. October 12, 2026 8 min read

CSS code using anchor-name and position-anchor next to a menu whose lime pill slides under the hovered link

Dev log CSS CSS anchor positioning: move elements on hover, no JavaScript Give the hovered element an anchor-name, make another element follow it with position-anchor, and add a transition. It slides there, no JavaScript. October 6, 2026 8 min read

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Dev log Performance 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. September 25, 2026 5 min read

PHP code example from this post

Dev log Security 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. September 25, 2026 4 min read

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Dev log Accessibility 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. September 25, 2026 6 min read

A robots.txt example for search and AI crawlers

Dev log SEO & AI search 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. September 25, 2026 5 min read

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Dev log Shopify 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. April 28, 2020 4 min read

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Dev log PHP How to increase the PHP memory limit (and WordPress too) Fix "Allowed memory size exhausted" by raising memory_limit in php.ini, .user.ini or .htaccess, or WP_MEMORY_LIMIT in wp-config.php. Then check which one wins. February 15, 2020 4 min read

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Dev log WordPress How to add /blog/ to WordPress post URLs Put /blog/ in front of every post URL with a custom permalink structure. Keep custom post types out of it with with_front, and keep old links working. January 20, 2020 4 min read