I clicked download on a nine-second “thank you” GIF. The file that landed was 18MB. This blog’s home page was 2.8MB before we converted every image to WebP to get it down. One reaction GIF would have undone all of that six times over. That was the most useful thing I learned from a day … Read more
Sometimes all you want is one effect on an image you already have, and opening a full editor for it feels absurd. I ran three browser tools through their paces: one builds repeating patterns, one turns photos into halftone dots or stipple, one tracks moving blobs in video and draws boxes around them. Nothing to … Read more
I spent a day clicking through three browser tools that do something with letters. One turns your handwriting into a font. One builds a typeface from sliders. One throws your sentence into 3D space and animates it. All three are free, and none asked me to sign up. After trying them, the line that mattered … Read more
You already know the big free-image sites. Unsplash, Pixabay — I rounded those up last time. This is a different shelf. Smaller, more specialized, the kind of thing you reach for mid-project: 3D icons, PSD mockups, Figma UI kits, open-source fonts. Eight of them. I picked on one thing above all — whether the license … Read more
You need to crop one photo, shrink it, maybe knock out the background. Search around and everyone points you straight at Photoshop — and a monthly subscription you didn’t plan on. Here’s the short version: most of the time, you don’t need it. And the free side got a lot better lately. How far does … Read more
These days AI comes up everywhere. Everyone else seems to have it figured out, and you’re left wondering what you’re actually supposed to do with it. That feeling is fair, and it’s more common than you’d think. Here’s the short version: there’s nothing to study first. You just ask, the way you’d text a friend … Read more
You can build a small program without writing a single line of code. You describe what you want in plain words, and an AI writes the code for you. People call this vibe coding. I used it to make a little dice game, and I dropped it right into this post. Press the button below … Read more
Decide to build a WordPress site and you hit a wall before you even start: wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Almost the same name, completely different things. Pick wrong here and every step after it goes sideways, so that fork is where this guide starts. This blog runs on WordPress. We installed two of them — an … Read more
You finish a post and need a picture for it. You search “free images,” a dozen sites come up, and grabbing one seems harmless. Years later some people get a letter from a law firm about that picture. Free does not mean the copyright went away. Free means someone gave you permission on certain terms, … Read more
When you move to WordPress from Blogger or a hosted platform, one small thing trips people up: the post URL. Some sites show a clean address like example.com/post-title. Others show example.com/?p=123. That gap comes down to one setting. Our own site runs on the clean version, /post-name/, and that’s where I’ll start. If you remember … Read more