There is a box at the end of a driveway near me most weekends with FREE written on the side in marker, and it is never junk. A bread maker that still works, half a can of deck stain, a kid’s bike two sizes too small for the kid, once a perfectly good canoe paddle. None of it is broken. It stopped being useful to the person who owns it, and it is worth more to a stranger walking past than it is sitting in a garage.
I have a version of that box and I have never once pointed at it. Free things have been piling up across my site and a few other accounts for years: images I commissioned for posts and will never use again, models I drew for a job in my own garage and uploaded because why not, a plugin, a theme. All of it free already. All of it scattered across four platforms that do not talk to each other, which means nobody has ever seen the pile in one piece, including me.
So I sat down and made the inventory, and honestly the count surprised me. That is the transferable bit, if you want one out of this: go and list what your business already gives away for nothing. Not what you plan to give away, what is already out there and already costing you zero. Most people I say this to find more than they expected, and find that it is invisible because it lives in five places with no index. The index is the cheapest marketing you will ever do. I gave a talk about this years ago and wrote about it again in Make a living giving it away, fifteen years on, and the argument has not changed much since. Giving the surplus away has paid me back every time, usually sideways and usually later.
This is the first of these. I will run one a month.
Twenty images, yours to take
Every one of these is doing a job on a live post or page here right now. They are Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated, which means there is no photographer or model to clear, and it is also why I would rather they got used twice than sat on one page forever. I’m releasing all twenty under a Creative Commons CC BY licence: free to use anywhere, including commercially, a credit and a link back appreciated but not chased. Put one on a blog post, or drop it into a slide deck nobody outside your company will ever see.
Five of them are flat editorial diagrams, which are the ones most likely to be useful to somebody else, because a diagram of a hub and four stages is a diagram of a hub and four stages no matter whose process it is.
aios-sunday-orchestration-case-feature.webp: a central hub labelled AIOS wired out to Analyse, Build, Verify and Ship. Currently on “A $61,847 Sunday afternoon.”three-prompts-one-theme-case-feature.webp: one Theme node branching into three Prompt paths. Currently on “I gave one WordPress theme to AI three times and got three different reviews.”after-the-review-harder-problem-case-feature.webp: a Review node, a Harder node, and a Gap sitting between the two. Currently on “After the review, the harder problem.”mlcampbell-lms-case-feature.webp: a LearnDash node running out to Enroll, Learn, Assess and Certify. Currently on “M.L. Campbell’s distributor training centre: a custom LearnDash LMS.”authors-guild-sitebuilder-case-feature.webp: one Platform branching into Site nodes, each with an Author hanging off it. Currently on “Before WordPress: how a 2002 author platform ran for sixteen years.”
Eight more are desks and paper. Notebooks, invoices, marked-up pages, the kind of thing you reach for when the post is about a decision somebody has to make and there is no photogenic object anywhere near it.
ask-ai-write-something-for-you-feature.webp: a handwritten note card trailing off mid-sentence, fountain pen laid across it. Currently on “How to get AI to write a first draft you can actually use.”case-for-the-second-draft-feature.webp: a printed page covered in red-pencil revision marks on pale maple. Currently on “The case for the second draft.”wordpress-government-discovery-call-questions-feature-1.webp: a printed vendor-evaluation scoring grid with a mechanical pencil. Currently on “WordPress on a government discovery call: eight questions a senior buyer should ask.”twenty-minute-discovery-call-feature-1.webp: an open spiral notebook of handwritten questions beside a proposal draft. Currently on “The 20-minute discovery call: what I ask, why I ask it, and what a good answer sounds like.”wordpress-consultant-charge-2026-feature.webp: a half-folded invoice, a mechanical pencil, a Post-it with a rate written on it by hand. Currently on “How to see through a technology pitch when tech isn’t your job.”who-owns-your-website-2026-feature.webp: a manila folder holding an access-record sheet, brass skeleton key sitting on top. Currently on “Who actually owns your website in 2026?”is-wordpress-dead-in-2026-feature.webp: a handwritten field-note page that starts at “Jan 2012 / SOPA” and trails down through later years. Currently on “Is WordPress dead in 2026?”technical-seo-thisismyurl_landing-2026-hero-v2.webp: a printed site-map architecture diagram and a mechanical pencil, shot from directly overhead. Currently on “Your site ranks for your name and nothing else.”
The last seven are objects, mostly old ones on a workbench, plus one lock gate. These are my favourites of the set, which I recognise is an opinion and not a recommendation.
roundup-series-2026-feature-5461.webp: a vintage spoke shave on a pale maple workbench. Currently on “Behind the scenes: a forced WordPress security update, and a bug I filed against core.”wordpress-7-ai-layer-plugin-developers-feature.webp: a vintage ceramic terminal strip with brass screw terminals. Currently on “Your WordPress now has an AI layer, and it still needs your judgment.”moodle-to-wordpress-lms-conversion-process-feature.webp: a vintage steel draughtsman’s compass, open, on a workbench. Currently on “Moodle to WordPress: when the move is the upgrade, and when it isn’t.”aoda-audit-federal-vendor-actually-asks-feature.webp: a chromed desktop hole punch with paper chads scattered around it. Currently on “Who gets to take the course: the access audit that decides it, and why most sites fail it.”wordpress-speed-optimization-thisismyurl_landing-2026-hero-v2.webp: an analogue stopwatch on pale oak, second hand stopped mid-sweep. Currently on “WordPress speed optimization your visitors actually feel.”niagara-thisismyurl_landing-2026-hero-v2.webp: Welland Canal lock gate machinery in early morning light. Currently on “WordPress and training for Niagara businesses, from someone who lives here.”fort-erie-website-design-thisismyurl_landing-2026-hero-v2.webp: a craftsman’s woodworking bench with a marking gauge, a chisel and an engineer’s square. Currently on “Fort Erie websites, built by someone who lives here.”
All twenty are attached to this post as downloadable files, so you can take one or take the whole set and sort it out later. If you get down the list and think what you actually need is a set of images that look like your brand rather than mine, that is the paid version and it lives over in writing and editorial work. Take a moment to appreciate I did not put that sentence in the first paragraph.
Sixteen things you can print
This is the same habit somewhere you might not expect it: a garage instead of a text editor. I have sixteen models up on MakerWorld, every one of them free, and free in the way that actually matters over there: no points, no unlock standing between you and the file. Most of them exist because I needed something, drew it, and ended up with a file sitting on a drive doing nothing afterward.
Nine of them went up in the last week, and they are all ghosts. It is September, I own a 3D printer, and the rest follows. Each one is a little ghost animal that sits over a tealight.
- Ghost Raccoon
- Ghost Penguin
- Ghost Fox
- Ghost Capybara
- Ghost Bunny
- Ghost Dog
- Ghost Cat
- Halloween Ghost Bear, which prints with or without the tealight cavity
I will confess the penguin went up twice, two minutes apart, because I clicked publish, watched nothing happen, and clicked it again like a man pressing a crosswalk button. Flawless logic. Nothing could possibly go wrong with pressing it a second time, and nothing did, except that there are now two penguins on my profile and only one of them is a design. Ignore the second penguin. The second penguin is a monument to my patience.
The older files are the useful ones, and they are all workshop and garden parts that I drew because buying the equivalent meant a drive and eleven dollars.
- Weed Puller / Bulb Planter for Garden
- Multi Purpose Hiking Gadget
- PEX Adapter 3/4″ to Garden Hose Fitting
- PEX Adapter, 1/2 to 3/4 threaded for garden hose
- PEX Adapter, 1/2″ to 3/4″
- 3.5″ Corner Jig for Cabinet Woodworking
- Drill Centering Jig for Woodworking
That last one, the drill centering jig, is released under CC0, which is about as close to public domain as a licence gets. Remix it, sell prints of it, put your own name on it, I genuinely do not mind. It is a cylinder with holes in it. The world does not need me to hold onto it.
One plugin and one theme, both on WordPress.org
Two releases have landed on WordPress.org recently, and both are free downloads there, which means you install them the normal way from inside your own dashboard and never touch my site at all.
Dashboard Notice Control went into the plugin directory on 14 August 2026. By default it suppresses admin notices across the dashboard, which on a site with a couple of dozen plugins installed can be most of the screen before you have read a single word of your own content. There is a settings page with an allowlist, so the notices you actually need, like a real security warning, still get through.
Quillwork came out on 7 July 2026. It is a typography-first theme, built for people whose site is mostly words and who would like those words to be pleasant to read on a phone at eleven at night. I wrote about why I built it in A free, typography-first WordPress theme: meet Quillwork, so I will not run through it twice.
This one runs monthly now
The plan is a post like this on the same cadence, every month, whatever is on the shelf that month. Some months that will be four new images and nothing else. Some months there will be a plugin. October will almost certainly have more ghosts in it, because I have a printer and I have not learned anything.
If you take something off this list and it turns out useful, I would like to hear about it, and if you take something and it turns out broken I would much rather hear about that. Either way the contact page works, and you do not have to be hiring me to use it.
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