Blog Topic Backlog

Add new ideas under ## Backlog, one per line. The weekly routine picks one at random and moves it to ## Used after writing the post (so nothing repeats and there's a record of what's been covered).

Backlog

  • Signs your website needs more than a facelift
  • What "IT consulting" actually means for a 5-person company
  • How to tell if a software migration is riskier than it looks
  • The maintenance work nobody budgets for after a website launches
  • Automating the parts of your business nobody enjoys doing
  • What a "quick fix" engagement actually looks like, start to finish
  • Why documentation matters even for a small, lean team
  • The IT problems small businesses don't notice until they're expensive
  • When a short sprint beats a full project (and vice versa)
  • What large language models actually are, explained without the hype
  • How AI is changing customer service for small retailers
  • What AI means for professional services firms (law, accounting, consulting)
  • AI and restaurants: reservations, reviews, inventory, and where it doesn't help
  • What contractors and trades businesses can actually use AI for today
  • How small healthcare practices are experimenting with AI (scheduling, intake — not diagnosis)
  • AI for e-commerce: product descriptions, support, and personalization done right
  • What real estate agents and small brokerages are doing with AI right now
  • The difference between "AI-powered" marketing and AI that actually saves time
  • How nonprofits and small mission-driven orgs are using AI on tight budgets
  • What actually changed in AI tools this year that matters to small business owners
  • Why you talk to the person doing the work, not an account manager, when you hire Terran Foundry
  • What a lean, small team can move faster on than a 50-person agency
  • The hidden cost of "enterprise-grade" tools you don't actually need
  • Why small engagements don't mean small attention
  • What happens when your agency contact changes every six months — and how a small, stable team avoids it
  • Why "no minimum retainer" changes what you're willing to ask for help with
  • The advantage of someone who did the website, the IT, and the AI rollout — and remembers all of it
  • What AI Means for Pet-Care and Boarding Businesses
  • What AI Tools Mean for Tutoring, Childcare, and Education-Focused Small Businesses
  • What AI Means for How Small Business Owners Plan Their Own Retirement or Exit
  • How AI-Driven Billing and Expense Tools Are Changing Small Business Finance
  • How Better AI Weather Forecasting Affects Small Businesses That Depend on It (landscaping, events, agriculture)
  • What AI Means for Small Travel Agencies and Local Tour Operators
  • What AI Means for Landscaping and Lawn Care Businesses
  • How Small Businesses Are Using AI to Adapt to Climate-Driven Disruption
  • What AI-Driven Water Data Means for Small Businesses in Water-Rights-Sensitive Regions
  • What AI-Driven Water Management Means for Small Businesses in Drought-Prone Areas
  • How to Keep Your Small Business From Falling Behind on AI
  • How to Get Your Small Business Caught Up on AI Without Overspending
  • Why Working With a Small, Focused Team Makes AI Adoption More Affordable
  • Why Small Businesses Should Be Concerned About Deepfakes and AI-Generated Fraud
  • What Laws Actually Govern AI Usage for Small Businesses Right Now
  • How AI Data Centers Are Straining Local Water Rights and Supplies
  • What AI Means for the Legal Industry (and the Legal Risks of Using It Yourself)
  • What AI Means for Medicine and Patient Care, Beyond Scheduling and Intake
  • How AI Can Help Ordinary People Push Back Against Large Companies
  • How Small Companies Are Actually Using AI to Cut Costs
  • What AI Is Changing About Travel and Tourism
  • Where AI Is Creating Jobs and Where It's Cutting Them, by Industry and Region
  • How AI Regulation Differs Across the US, Europe, and Asia
  • How AI Is Changing National Defense and Military Strategy
  • Is AI Actually Helping Fight Climate Change, or Making It Worse
  • Why Some Companies Are Pulling Back After Going All-In on AI

Used

  • Questions to ask before hiring any AI vendor (2026-07-29)
  • AI model pricing/capability trend, hooked on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 release (2026-08-03, news-driven: Anthropic's July 24, 2026 announcement of Claude Opus 5, corroborated by TechCrunch)
  • Agentic AI risk / credential hygiene, hooked on the OpenAI model that broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face (2026-08-10, news-driven: OpenAI's and Hugging Face's own July 2026 incident disclosures, corroborated by TechCrunch)
  • Vendor concentration risk / single point of failure, hooked on GitHub's August 17, 2026 outage and its months-long pattern of AI-agent-driven reliability incidents (2026-08-17, news-driven: BleepingComputer and GeekWire same-day reporting, corroborated by GitHub's own status page and company blog)
  • Open-source supply chain risk / dependency hygiene, hooked on the August 20, 2026 crates.io attack that briefly poisoned the widely used arrayref Rust library with build-time malware (2026-08-24, news-driven: the Rust Project's own incident writeup, corroborated by BleepingComputer and The Register)
  • WordPress plugin/theme patch hygiene, hooked on five critical unauthenticated takeover vulnerabilities disclosed in late August 2026 across WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada/Fusion Builder, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP (2026-08-31, news-driven: Wordfence's own vulnerability disclosures for Avada and TranslatePress, corroborated by The Hacker News and BleepingComputer)
  • Skepticism about AGI hype vs. real security-hygiene urgency, hooked on OpenAI's September 3, 2026 release of GPT-6 Astra and its "Critical" cybersecurity capability rating (2026-09-07, news-driven: OpenAI's own safety overview and Preparedness Framework documentation, corroborated by Axios and CSO Online)
  • E-commerce platform patch hygiene / zero-day exposure, hooked on the CVE-2026-75650 ("StyleSmuggler") critical unauthenticated RCE in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, exploited in the wild before Adobe's September 7, 2026 patch shipped (2026-09-14, news-driven: Adobe's own APSB26-146 security bulletin, corroborated by The Hacker News and BleepingComputer)
  • How a small consultancy scopes work differently than an agency sales team (2026-09-21, from backlog)