After launching three eCommerce websites on Shopify in April, I was laid off when CoffeeAm was sold to a company in Colorado. Those three sites were over a year’s work and over a thousand product graphics made in .GIMP. And that came after a vacation with my family. This is the life of a marketer – always vulnerable in a lay off.
The good news is I was scooped up by a local manufacturer that produces outdoor displays. All their displays are high-end and engineered to withstand just about any thing thrown at them. But please don’t throw things at our displays. The company has over 25 thousand displays shipped in countries all over the planet.
I was hired to create and maintain their social media accounts and push their marketing online through Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are two brands – BoldVu and MRI. MRI is a bit tricky as there is an ocean of content already bearing that term. After getting that off the ground and establishing a pattern of posts I turned my focus on their sites.
The first site was set up with a proprietary theme hosted on WP Engine. The walled off theme replaced the Gutenberg block system with it’s own so I replaced the theme with a child theme of Frost; a free theme from WP Engine. The second I built in the spring of 2026 using a the same approach with Frost. Both are up and available on BoldVu.com and MRI-Inc.net.
Up until 2026, I was using AI as a jump start on content and as assistance with large blocks of code. At MRI, I’m leaning into it by build a whole suite of WordPress plugins. It also batch processes large sets of images – cropping, color adjustments, exposure, and a bit of filling in. The filling in works like the stamp tool but it just isn’t as good as manually adding edge filler in GIMP.
2025 was a year I dedicated to leaving Microsoft Windows and Adobe in favor for open source. So, now I’m running fully on Pop!_OS, Pulsar, Shotcut, OBS Studio, Android Studio (for Flutter), GIMP, Blender, and Figma or Inkscape. I’m almost completely off print work but I did have a client request a simple poster in June.
Also, I moved everything I could off of AWS. We’re done with that. The pricing was too complicated – hidden costs in “free” services that turned out to not be free. I’m now hosting three sites and an app (gunicorn+flask) which is turned off and costs nothing, all on Digital Ocean. The prices is less than half of what I was paying.