Been working to modernize, speed up the back end of the blog

There is a lot of old junk in my blog, and I have never fully mastered WordPress even though I write my own custom theme and a lot of custom code to make it run. But I never adopted many modern plugins, nor until just this past week did I enable object caching or set up a content delivery network – or even advanced javascript and style sheet compression. But recently, I’ve been trying to learn about those technologies, both because the advertisers want it for maximum revenue, and I’ve been having increasing issues with aggressive search bots trolling the blog, looking for information to vacuum up for AI models. And truth is I’d rather let the professionals do more programming – use established, often more secure and quicker code then I’ve written over the years.