Welcome to my Pensieve
A collection place for all of my random thoughts, discoveries and interests. Tips about photography, website design, website speed, travel, wine and anything at all that sparks my interest as I journey through life.
A Collection of Useful Articles for Photographers and Others
As a professional photographer, who is interested in tech. I read a lot of random articles every day of my life, while trawling the internet. When I find useful things, I’m going to post them here. To save my brain having to keep them all inside. I hope others find these tips and tricks useful.
If you’d like to know how to Speed Up Your Website – get in touch. I run a simple course that will teach you everything you need to know to make your website run FAST! It’s not magic, there are no dodgy tricks. It’s just logical thinking and understanding why and how things work the way they do. It takes a logical mind to understand how computers think.
- Lightroom DeNoise AI – First Impressions
Adobe has just announced a new update to Lightroom. I’m using Lightroom Classic version 12.3 (April 2023). Just thought I’d run an old image of mine through the new process, to see what it does (how well it does it). My current go to program for de-noise is Topaz Photo AI, which is extremely good,… - Best Apple Mac for Wedding Photographers Which is the best Apple Mac for a Wedding Photographer? I must get asked this question at least once a week. If I don’t get asked direct then it comes up on wedding photographer forums constantly. To save myself the trouble of retyping my reply each and every time, I’m writing a very short article…
- Good File Names & Folder Structure
Just a quick blog post about how to create good filenames, that computers understand and keep your files organised. Plus organising your folders into logical names so that you can find anything on your computer quickly. This is so important for photographers, especially wedding photographers who may be shooting 30 plus weddings every year. Once… - How to Speed up your old iMac
I’ve had to deal with this issue many times in my years of working as a professional photographer on various Apple Mac machines. But in the last few years, working on an iMac the methods of speeding things up are fairly limited, but actually very easy to do – and importantly, they are not expensive… - AVIF Image Format Test I’ve been testing out the new AVIF image format. Smaller than WebP and potentially faster loading.
- Core Web Vitals Checker
A great website for checking how every page on your website performs for the Google Core Web Vitals. - WordPress Themes – Speed Test
A simple test of 5 popular themes, so see how much they affect the speed of your website. - Idiots Guide to Slow Web Hosting
What happens if you use a slow web hosting company? The Tortoise & The Hare Unlike in the fable, with a web server, the hare will always win. If you are using a Tortoise to collect your assets, you’re gonna be waiting a long time for them to arrive. When you first load a website…. - TTFB – How Fast is a Fast Web Host? I spend a lot of time testing people’s websites. It’s become something of an obsession, after learning why my own website was running slow, I learned more about more about server response times. And I’m still learning. People used to like to say that if your website loaded in under 2 seconds, you had nothing…
- Quality versus Price A subject that has for many years fascinated me and continues to fascinate me the older I get. I can never quite get over how some people value things totally differently to others. Of course, everything has its relevance to one’s own situation. Water to a thirsty person has far more value than to someone…
- Idiots Guide to FTP What is FTP? FTP is short for “File Transport Protocol” If you think of other shorthand codes you know for the internet – HTTP for example. That stands for “Hypertext Transport Protocol”. So they are both related to transferring data for websites. Http is used for us to view websites from the outside – their…
- How to Clear Website Cache Fully
How to ensure you’ve fully cleared the cache When testing your website, for speed to or checking errors. It’s really important to ensure you have cleared every single cache that may affect what you are actually seeing. A good friend of mine and one of my website speed clients, had this exact issue yesterday. We… - How Fast is Your Web Hosting and Theme – The Bare Page Test
I’ve been speeding up my website for over two years now. It’s been a journey, and as with all journeys, along the way I’ve met many people, hung out on numerous forums and learned new techniques and methods at every turn. And I continue to learn every day. One of the things that I learned,… - Idiots guide: How to Move Your Website to New Hosting
As part of my Website Speed teaching, one thing comes up time and time again. Slow hosting. So many photographers have their websites on slow website hosting. Think of website hosting as the foundation for your website. Build something on a poor quality foundation, it doesn’t matter how good everything else is, the hosting will… - Removing Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL is a great little plugin for when you are switching your site from https:// (insecure) to the newer https:// (secure). HTTP – Hypertext Transfer ProtocolHTTPS – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure The problem with Really Simple SSL, is that once you’ve finished making everything secure. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there… - Best way to Move Photos between Hard Drives
How to safely move large amounts of images from one hard drive to another, with 100% accurate results every time. - Best ShortPixel Settings for Photographers Best Settings for ShortPixel Image Optimiser – for Photographers. Optimum image compression with zero loss of quality.
- How to Speed up Your Website!
I can be a little obsessive with things. I don’t like being beaten if I can find out a way to win. So when I started testing my websites for speed, like many of you, I found it extremely frustrating. Running your website through Google’s page speed insights is like pulling your own teeth. Painful!… - Automated Backups Using Chronosync
Once you’ve started making your first few backups via Chronosync, wouldn’t it be great if you could set it to look after itself, without you having to ever think about it? I’m always forgetting things, if I had to do my own backups, I’m bound to forget. And sod’s law states – the time you… - Highlight H1, H2 Headings on a Website
Over the years I’ve found a few useful Chrome Extensions, that can help identify H1, H2, H3 etc. headings on a website, however most of them simply list what the headings are. What I was after was an extension that would actually point to each heading and tell me what H value it was. I… - Boot Backup Drive
How to create a Bootable Backup Drive
FAST WEB HOSTING
If you’re looking for a fast web host, you can’t go wrong with these two options. This site runs on Krystal and my main photo website runs on WPX. They are both superb and great value too.
