A couple weeks on the road
We've spent a fair amount of August driving to and from Idaho. Our daughter headed out for a two-week NOLS backpacking trip, which meant one road trip to drop her off and another to pick her up.
We took the scenic route home: Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Beartooth Pass, Grand Prismatic, Old Faithful and Artist Point. At Grand Targhee we hiked up Fred Mountain and, in an arrangement I highly recommend, rode the chairlift back down. Our daughter even managed to fit in some horseback riding after two weeks carrying a backpack.
It was also a good excuse to get away from screens for a while — which, after the amount of thinking we've been doing about AI lately, was welcome.
Against Inevitability
Earlier this summer I tried to put into words something bigger than our position on any particular technology.
There's a story in tech that consolidation is inevitable: bigger platforms, bigger clouds, bigger AI models, fewer companies controlling more of the infrastructure everybody depends on.
We don't think it is.
Against Inevitability is about why Freelock continues to bet on open source, ownership, diversity, human-scale systems and small organizations cooperating instead of consolidating — and why we think those choices matter even more in the age of AI.
As I wrote there: “Inevitability is a sales pitch.”
Read Against Inevitability →
From Drupal 5 to Drupal Canvas: Keeping KSER on the Air Through Two Decades of the Web
KSER is a community radio station. Community radio doesn’t get downtime — or a huge IT budget.
We started maintaining KSER’s Drupal 5 site in 2013, even though Drupal 5 had already reached end-of-life. For more than a decade, we kept it secure, stable, and useful while the station put its resources where they mattered most.
Now KSER has a new home on Drupal 11 and Drupal CMS, with Drupal Canvas for easier content management and a persistent audio player that keeps the station streaming while visitors move through the site.
Sometimes the right answer isn’t “rebuild now.” It’s maintain what you have well, then replace it when the time is right.
Freelock News
We published our AI Use Policy
We use AI a lot. We also think companies using it should be clear about how.
Our new AI Use Policy spells out where we use AI, how we handle client information, and where human review and responsibility fit into the process. It's the practical companion to Against Inevitability: AI is useful technology, not something we think should be adopted uncritically just because everyone says it's inevitable.
Read our AI Use Policy →
Making WordPress hosting harder to knock over
We've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on high-traffic WordPress hosting.
For one of our clients, that has included dialing in Nginx FastCGI caching, blocking attack patterns that were tying up WordPress workers, and building better ways to handle the traffic spikes their newsletters generate.
One interesting piece: rather than permanently paying for substantially more server capacity, we're working on cache warming and automatically turning stronger bot protection on when it's actually needed. The goal is to handle the peaks without tripling the idle hosting bill — and without making another giant internet intermediary such as Cloudflare a required part of the architecture.
Taming the premium-plugin mess
WordPress's premium plugin ecosystem has another problem: every vendor seems to have its own licensing system.
That gets particularly painful when copying production databases into development environments. Suddenly plugins think they've moved, licenses need to be reactivated, and somebody has to go find credentials in a collection of vendor dashboards.
We're building tooling to export and restore that license state automatically, and rolling it into a new WP Flake project modeled after the Drupal Flake environment we've been using for Drupal development.
It's not glamorous work. It is exactly the sort of work that makes maintaining a site substantially less painful six months or six years from now.
That’s really the theme of this issue: build what makes sense, maintain it well, and don’t give up control of the things your organization depends on.
If your site is getting harder to maintain, harder to secure, or harder to understand, get in touch. We’re happy to take a look.
And if you want the next issue — including a follow-up on what “getting close” really means for an AI-assisted migration — make sure you’re on the list.
