It is very important for your site visitors and for SEO to have your site load fast.

Here are a few things I do to make things fast on my site.

Fast hosting: Kinsta

Content Delivery Network: Cloudflare

I use the following performance-related plugins:

• Perfmatters

Of course, it is also important to use quality plugins on your site. Quality is more important than quantity. Ignore people who just say that many plugins installed and activated slow down your site, it all depends on the quality of those plugins. Sometimes you install just 5-10 plugins and the plugin slows down immensely because of what those plugins actually do or how they are coded.

Manual optimizations worth mentioning

I like to set up cron via the server instead of WordPress cron. I also use Perfmatters’ script manager to selectively load scripts on every page of my site, instead of letting plugins load their scripts on every page indiscriminately.

Another optimisation that can be done where possible, is to avoid using third-party fonts like the Google Fonts, you can easily do away with them unless you have specific branding guidelines to follow. This will provide a further speed boost to your page.

Testing

I use the following tests to make sure everything is running smoothly:

• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• Webpagetest.org
• Google Chrome’s Audit feature
• Google Analytics’ Page Speed feature

Also make sure that you test both the desktop and mobile versions of your site, as they might be loading different content and thus merit the need to be tested separately.

Hope those speed and site optimisation tips help, let me know if you think I missed anything.

I’ve had a wish to learn electronics for a very long time, and this year I took the plunge and bought some kit to get started. Here’s the stuff I bought and some other resources I found useful.

Hardware

• Keyes electronics kit SMP0051
• NodeMCU ESP8266 Lua WiFi Internet Development Board (alternative to Arduino)
• Raspberry Pi3 Official Desktop Starter Kit 16GB
• XL830L Multimeter

Books

• Eléctronica para makers – Guía completa
• Hacking Electronics
• Make: Electronics
• Make: More Electronics

Websites

• Startingelectronics.org – used their tutorials to build my first real circuits.
• Sparkfun.com – Great tutorials and quiz to learn the basics.
• Building Electronic Circuits
• Electronics-tutorials
• Thingiverse
• Predictabledesigns

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Gmail is the preferred (and free) email address solution for individuals using email in a personal capacity. Everyone should have a personal email address, even if they have additional professional email addresses they use in their business dealings. It’s always better to keep things separate. If your name is Joe Bloggs any of the combinations are great:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

If you have a very common name (a la “Joe Bloggs”) you will probably find that the obvious combinations mentioned above will be taken. In that case, you might want to add a number, for example, your year of birth. This is up to you, some people don’t want to make that public so that would not be a good choice for their email address. A favorite number might also be another option to go for.

You might also have a name that is not easy to pronounce, very long or that can be misinterpreted (e.g. Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor). In such cases, I would suggest you go for something simpler than your name. Here’s when things might go south. The first rule you have to keep in mind is that you might very well be keeping the same email address for the rest of your life, and it’s not that straightforward to change the address at a later stage.

To give you an idea of bad choices people do, [email protected] might be OK for a teenage girl, but chances are she will be regretting the choice when she is applying for a job a few years later.

In this post I’ll be sharing the apps, websites and tools I use on a daily basis. What’s the point? Well, I’d like to look back to this lineup on a yearly basis and see whether I can improve the way I work online.

Moreover, maybe you’ll find a new app/website listed here and you’ll decide to try it out based on my recommendation.

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This is the hardware that makes up my office. These items are all I need to run my business from wherever I am around the world. Since this year I am doing less work on-the-go and have mostly been working from Barcelona, I’ve had the opportunity to make a few additions to my setup. While some items are not very portable, most of my hardware can easily be packed and moved around to new locations.

The main change compared to last year’s setup is the addition of an Apple iMac 27″ computer, and my selling of the MacBook Pro 15″. I now use just one monitor for working, so it’s either the iMac or the small MacBook when I’m working from cafes or traveling. I still have the Dell monitor but I am planning to use it to set up a business dashboard when I have time. The MacBook was getting very hot on a daily basis with the fans making a significant noise especially during the frequent video editing and production that I’m now doing due to padel match recording. With the iMac I have significantly more power and don’t have problems of noise or slowness anymore. As always, I was able to sell the MacBook at a very good price. It’s one of the reasons why I always purchase Apple hardware; their resale value is incredibly strong and they are quick sells.

The iPhone is getting slow lately, and I plan to substitute it with this year’s iPhone X when that is released later this year.

Another minor upgrade is the Rode Podcaster microphone, switching from the ATR2100 mic. My friend James Laws had a few of these mics lying around after modernizing his studio and upgrading to better mics, so he generously sent me one. I don’t think it’s worth spending money to upgrade from the ATR2100 if that’s your current setup, but since it came at no cost, it was a worthwhile upgrade for me.

I also upgraded to the GoPro 6 from the GoPro 3+. There is a significant difference in quality, color profile and of course image stabilization which is worth the upgrade alone.

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