Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

New WordPress Services: Fast Fixes for Portland Businesses

2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Your WordPress site is either making you money or costing you opportunities. I’m opening up my calendar for quick-turn projects—and offering free site audits to new clients.

With 10+ years building WordPress sites, I’ve seen the same problems tank small business budgets: slow load times, security vulnerabilities, broken plugins, and sites that just stop working.

What I’m Offering

See the full list on my WordPress services page. Here is a quick rundown:

Quick-turnaround emergency WordPress rescue
Site speed optimization
Security hardening
Plugin customization

I am also available for monthly WordPress support retainers.

First-Time Client Special

Free 30-minute WordPress site audit (normally $75)

What you’ll get:

Speed analysis with specific fixes
Security vulnerability check
Plugin bloat assessment
Prioritized action plan

No obligation. Just honest feedback on what’s holding your site back.

Between the lines

I’m based in Portland, but work with businesses anywhere. Projects are priced for value and speed—not hourly rates that incentivize me to work slowly.

The bottom line: If your WordPress site is slow, insecure, or broken, you’re losing money every day. Let’s fix it this week, not next quarter.

What next?

Contact me on my WordPress services page, or using the form below.

Questions? Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.

Interviewed on "Prot Speaks"

2025-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Well-known Emacs package creator Protesilaos Stavrou interviewed me for his video podcast series, “Prot Asks.” We talked about a wide variety of topics, from Emacs to podcasting to Portland to public transit. I thought it was a great time, and perhaps you will like it, too!

You can read and view the video on Prot’s website and blog, or you can go straight to YouTube, or you can watch it embedded here below.

Note that Prot is looking for people to talk to on this series! You can join in by signing up on his website.

P.S. In the video, I promised that I would do another Emacs Carnival blog post, and I will, I swear! It is in my org-mode to-do file.

Many Posts of Interest for January 2024

2024-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Once again, I have collected far too many links over far too long a period of time. Anyhow, here is a collection of blog posts and links from around the web that I found to be good reading over the past couple of months. Is it too late in January to say Happy New Year?

2024 has been a pretty weird year for me so far. I spent the first couple weeks of the year in isolation, and then Portland got hit with a Snowpocalypse (I love how that’s a regular thing now), followed by freezing rain. This is the third day in a row that the sidewalk outside my front door is basically an ice skating rink. That means it’s a great time to do some reading!

Security

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive [Security] I really appreciate this incredible breakdown of Signal’s costs and how they use donations. Signal is cool. You should be using it. For real.
Breaking Laptop Fingerprint Sensors (Bruce Schneier) [Security] Do people actually use their laptop fingerprint sensors? I hate mine. I just disable the dang things and use a password.
Surveillance by the US Postal Service (Bruce Schneier) [Security] To Catch a Thief, starring Cliff from Cheers.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon opens discussion of push notification surveillance by Apple and Google (Rick Turoczy) [Security] There is some interesting legal stuff going on around the ability of tech companies like Apple and Google to use push notifications to capture user data that could be used for nefarious purposes. Definitely a story to keep your eye on!
Holding NSA’s Feet To The Fire (jcs) [Security] Here is a second post about Senator Ron Wyden. He appears to be fighting the good fight! Go Senator Wyden!

Emacs

Transient for convenience with emms [Emacs] Tory Anderson shares a really convenient EMMS control panel that uses the new version of transient.
Talk to Emacs with a GPT4 Co-Worker [Emacs] Gallagher Pryor shares a method he has for speaking to Emacs using ChatGPT-4. This is from back in November, so perhaps he has a package now!
Jeremy Friesen: Mentoring VS-Coders as an Emacsian (Jeremy Friesen) [Emacs] I really enjoyed this talk about moving people away from VS Code and toward Emacs. The big takeaway for this talk seemed to be that demonstrating what Emacs could do was going to be more effective than just arguing. Let Emacs win just by letting it do what it does.
Jeremy Friesen: Test Driving a Campaign Status Document (Jeremy Friesen) [Emacs] This post has some superb ideas for running a TTRPG campaign from Emacs. I’ve been doing this for a while, but my documents get really messy. I need something a bit more structured.
EmacsConf backstage: Using Spookfox to publish YouTube and Toobnix video drafts (Sacha Chua) [Emacs] I love how crazy this is: using spookyfox to work with YouTube’s crappy interface to do things to videos. Go Sacha!
Charles Choi: Improving Emacs isearch Usability with Transient (Charles Choi) [Emacs] This is pretty cool. I recently learned about how rich the isearch feature set is, but I haven’t played around with it a ton yet. Another thing to add to my Emacs to-do list!
William Denton: Basic citations in Org (Part 1) (William Denton) [Emacs] This is an excellent introduction to how citations work in org-mode. There are four parts in the series so far, so keep reading!

Programming

Pike’s Rules Of Programming (jcs) [Programming] These are some good rules, even if they can make some parts of programming a little less exciting.
Variations on styling variables in SSGs (Bryce Wray) [Programming] I am still using Sass a lot more than the vanilla CSS stuff that should be replacing it. Also, I am starting to see that this is a change I’ll need to take in my future WebDev adventures.
Firefox on the brink? (Bryce Wray) [Programming] Bryce Wray is warning (or predicting?) that Firefox may be in a very dangerous spot in its loss of user share. This is really disappointing, given how evil Chrome continues to be. And it’s only going to get more evil. Convince your friends to run Firefox!
Zachary Kanfer: Numberdle! (Zachary Kanfer) [Programming] This is a really fun browser game for people who enjoy numbers more than words. Move over, Wordle!!

History

Finally, here’s something fun to share with the kids.

The Teddy Bear Was Once Seen as a Dangerous Influence on Young Children Before gifting stuffed animals to the wee ones in your life, consider that bears are dangerous!

Posts of Interest for 6 October 2023

2023-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is my first attempt at using elfeed-curate to collect interesting blog posts and share them. I have also attempted to subscribe to the RSS feed for the #Emacs hashtag on Mastodon, but that doesn’t seem to be working correctly yet. I’ve seen other blogs do similar things, but is this useful for my blog? I don’t know! Let me know what you think.

Computers (4)

The intriguing announcement of Cloudflare Fonts (Bryce Wray) [Programming] Oooh, this is cool. Bryce Wray talks about the introduction of Cloudflare Fonts!
What to know about new generative AI tools for criminals (Mike Elgan) [Security] Generative AI is still a minor concern for security professionals, but the threat is rising! This is an interesting look at the state of the art and current means for addressing the threat.
Alex Schroeder: 2022-03-20 Torchbearers and bodyguards (Alex Schroeder) [Emacs] Alex Schroeder continues his exploration of running tabletop RPGs using Emacs. Check out the other blog posts in the series—they are a lot of fun. I have been playing with Emacs for running TTRPGs, as well. Someday I’ll explain my methods.
Elfeed-curate (jcs) [Emacs] Elfeed-curate sounds like a really neat package. This is my first annotation using that package, which I will soon attempt to export.

Portland (1)

Tour of Untimely Departures – SOLD OUT! (lfadmin) The Tour of Untimely Departures is an annual event at Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland. But guess what? It’s already sold out! It sold out a while back, but I didn’t notice because my RSS feed for the Friends of Lone Fir was broken.

Now Working with CommerceCollective!

2015-05-26T15:02:27+00:00

I am now working with my good friends at CommerceCollective! CommerceCollective is a web presence management company located here in Portland, Oregon, and they are great at SEO and social media stuff. They also are really talented web designers. If you’re looking for a full website solution, from design down to the nuts and bolts, we are the place to go.

I’ll be supplementing their services with full-stack web development, IT consulting, and a little bit of copy writing. Read more about our team here!

The History of Cryptography at PUGS

2015-04-21T15:11:17+00:00

Portland Underground Graduate School (PUGS) has invited me to teach a class on the history of cryptography starting May 4th. The class will be four sessions and is very affordable: only $40!

We will cover the basics of cryptography, where it came from, and why it’s important. In addition, I will teach you how to use a number of manual cryptographic techniques. I’m really excited about this class, and I can’t wait to share my knowledge!

To learn more and to sign up, please visit the PUGS class listing here.

Random Link Rodeo

2015-02-17T16:43:32+00:00

I’ve been working on a few projects, but nothing I can share publicly. However, I’ve also been out in the world of the Portland tech community, which has been excellent. If you haven’t heard of Calagator yet, go check it out.

Last week, I went to a meet-and-greet for developer evangelists from Google Cloud Platform. After talking to one of the Google devs, I was convinced to give Go a try. He told me that Go has type inference, and while I was dismayed to learn that it only has type inference on variable declarations, it still looks like a good language. I’m playing around with sawsij and Google App Engine and should have something to share in a few weeks.

Last night, I went to a PDX WordPress Meetup, where I saw Kronda Adair of Karvel Digital give a presentation called “5 Common Website Owner Mistakes and How to Fix Them.” After the talk, there was some interesting talk about website optimization and the “noisy neighbor” problem in cloud computing.

Next week, I’m looking forward to the PdxDevOps meeting, mostly because I’ve realized that this is what I do most of the time. When I build websites, I tend to handle everything from hosting and system administration through software development.

I’m really impressed by how full and rich the Portland tech community is. So far I’ve met a lot of great people in it, and I look forward to meeting more.