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Notes from the Riksi studio in Melbourne. Plain guides on WordPress, Shopify, front-end code, speed and the tools I use every day.

A laptop on an oak desk showing three plan cards labelled Basic, Grow and Advanced

Guide Site upgrades Which Shopify plan do I need? Basic, Grow, Advanced or Plus Know which Shopify plan fits your shop today, and the sales level where Grow or Advanced starts to pay for itself. Five quick questions, in Australian dollars. September 28, 2026 4 min read

A laptop on an oak desk showing a website speed report with a lime green score

Guide Site upgrades How to speed up a slow WordPress site A faster site in an afternoon: fewer plugins, smaller images, page caching, a CDN and minified files. Most of it is free, and WP Rocket covers the rest. September 28, 2026 5 min read

A phone on a desk showing a text reminder about an appointment tomorrow, beside a paper appointment book

Guide Site upgrades 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. September 26, 2026 3 min read

A phone showing an email about items left in a cart, with a lime Back to cart button

Guide Marketing 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. September 26, 2026 4 min read

A site check list with ticks for WordPress, PHP, plugins and theme on a laptop screen

Guide Site upgrades Is your website out of date?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. September 26, 2026 4 min read

Terminal showing curl -I https://example.com/old-page/

Trick Terminal 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. September 25, 2026 3 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

CSS code example from this post

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

A browser open at homeassistant.local:8123 next to a small single-board computer

Diary Smart home 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. June 11, 2021 4 min read