Sustainable/Open Business

A major new release for WordPress dropped today -- perhaps the one with the biggest impact in WordPress history!

Should you upgrade?

Probably not just yet. At least not if you have content to publish.

Have you ever heard the one about the web developer who goes in to make one last change to the site at 4:45PM on a Friday afternoon? It is SUCH an easy fix--he can get it done and go home for the weekend with his head held high. Ah, what a relaxing weekend it will be!

At 12:27pm, our alerts started firing. Multiple ones -- website down, server down, secondary monitoring -- one of our client's servers had completely disappeared off the Internet.

Here at Freelock, we are all in for web development. Truly, what could be more important for our clients in today's climate than a properly functioning and safe website?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Moz.com, SEO is “a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results”.

A common question of companies wanting to drive traffic to their website is “Should we advertise in the search engines? Or conduct a search engine optimization project? Neither? Both?” Based on 20 years of helping people with marketing in search engines, here are a few thoughts.

It's only taken two years since the release of Drupal 8 for us to get our own site updated... Cobbler's children and all. But finally, we are proud to unveil our shiny new site!

But wait, don't you tell your clients you don't need a new site?

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

We're nearing launch of two new Drupal Commerce sites, one of them being this one. It turns out Freelock.com has some relatively sophisticated commerce needs: some taxable products, some non-taxable products. Recurring subscriptions. Arbitrary invoice payments.

Drupal security updates generally come out on Wednesdays, to try to streamline everybody's time. WordPress security notices come out... well, whenever whichever feed you subscribe to bothers to announce something.

I just read a quick post over on another Drupal shop's blog, Be a Partner, not a Vendor, and added a comment to the great point Dylan made about n