We received a letter from Domain Name Services letting us know our domain was going to expire in a few months and they can “Transfer” and “Renew” for us.
This means they basically want to steal our domain. They probably want to sell it back to us at a high price.
Please be aware of this this scam and protect your domain. Your domain name is critical. It not only controls your website, but your company email address. It is essential for a company to have their domain in their email address but it is another way to verify a communication is valid. Sending business emails with an “@gmail” account raises flags.
Working on an existing DIVI site we needed to change a few things in the custom footer area; however, the page builder would just spin. We cleared the cache in DIVI and the on the server, but nothing worked. A search on the web got us our answer.
The solution was “Permalinks“. We had to set them back to “plain“. We cleared out the cache in DIVI and on the server. We set the permalinks back to “Post”. After that the builder was working!
We get these from time to time, but we have never written about it. We just want to do IT work and fix stuff, so we find these annoying and just want to put a warning. They often come from “State” agencies who need equipment. Often the information is slightly skewed. In the last case we noticed the email address had an extra letter “d” to the domain. Here is what their emails look like. We highlighted the things that tipped us off.
We get these about 4 or 5 times a year, and sometimes waste our sales teams time running it down.
Windows 10 has been super stable for a long time, but all good things must come to an end. Windows 10 will reach its end-of-life on October 14, 2025. We first noticed an issue last November when one of our older machines wouldn’t boot. It turned out to be an outdated TPM issue with the motherboard. This was the first sign we had that Windows 10 Security was going to require more current hardware.
What does this all mean, and what are my options?
Windows cannot continue to secure their operating system without the proper TPM being on the computer. There are 4 options currently available.
Purchase Extended Support from Microsoft – This will extend updates and support for one additional year. The cost is less than $100. You will still need to purchase new equipment later on.
Purchase new equipment – This will be your best option. You won’t need to change anything in one year. Your systems will be safer. Probably resulting in lower overall costs.
Don’t connect this machine to the Internet – Attacks typically happen over the Internet.
Change Operating System – Linux is a free operating system that can bring life to an old machine. Not used in business environment.
We would recommend an audit of your systems. Our techs have been gearing up for the move to Windows 11, and know what to look for in hardware to ensure the machine can move to 11.
Contact us via our website or call us at (410) 290-1591.
We were testing out some Gantry Particles for a Joomla! website, and one of the “header” particles came with a search field. When we started using this particle’s search no search results were returning. We were getting results from the default search module until we started using the search in the particle. Somehow the search component was no longer working.
This lead us down the path of how exactly does the search component working in Joomla!, and why doesn’t it just work? Frustrating to say the least.
Our issue was resolved by the following process:
Go to Components >> Smart Search >> Index
Click on “Options” in the upper-right and set your desired options
Then click the “Index” button.
This should resolve your issue. Let us know if this helped you…
While helping a new customer out with their WordPress website we were getting the error “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON“. We haven’t seen this error before, but it a very common one. The error would happen when we would try to make even just a small text change. We couldn’t do anything till this was fixed.
There were a ton of solutions out there on the web, but this just wasn’t fixing our issue. The customer was using Godaddy’s Ultimate Managed WordPress hosting. We tried flushing the cache, but this didn’t help. We tried changing the permalinks, but the error Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON prevent us from changing the permalinks.
We tried all the fixes suggested and nothing worked. We finally called Godaddy tech support and they were blaming the cache. We cleared all the cache and waited till the next day to give the hosting time to clear out. The next day we came back and the permalinks had changed away from “custom”. Now we could make the changes and the site was running better.
Godaddy didn’t say they flushed the cache, but something changed. Maybe we just needed to wait till the Content Distribution Network (CDN) cache was cleared.
Our best advice for this issue is to use a “Private Browser” window. This seemed to work the best.
Taking over a customer’s Godaddy Managed WordPress website we wanted to access their “All-in-one-migration” backup files. The website site wouldn’t let us download them due to permissions issues. We dug around in the account and found the process we needed. Here are the steps.
Go to your GoDaddy Product Page
Next to “Managed WordPress” select “Manage All“.
Select the site you want to use and go to the “Settings” tab.
Under “Production Site“, find SSH/SFTP login and select View or Change. Copy the “Hostname” for use in your FTP program and “Create new login“.
You can also access the files in the “File Browser” in the “Settings” menu.
The “All-in-one-migration” backup files are located in the “wp-content > ai1wm-backups” directory.
We especially like WordPress for blogging, but like other software things break. Our blog suddenly wasn’t displaying correctly. The first place to look is in the Themes section; however, when we logged in “themes” link wasn’t available. Disabling all the plugins didn’t fix the issue.
We started the repair by downloading the latest backup, restoring it, and seeing if it was broken as well. It wasn’t. On the live site we installed the latest version of WordPress again, but that didn’t fix the issue of not being able to view the themes. With the restored version we went through the plugins one by one and we found it.
The issue turned out to be the theme we tried but wasn’t running. It was the “Screenly Cast for WordPress” plugin that was causing the issue. We had the plugin disabled; however the issue wasn’t resolved yet. We discovered when we viewed the site and moved our mouse over the link to get to the WordPress Dashboard we had the link to get to the Themes. It took us to our themes and we could see the Screenly Cast for WordPress theme was now the active theme. We switched it back the theme we were using and this resolved the issue. We now had the Themes link back in the Appearance menu of the Dashboard.
We have used this plugin in the past and had great success with it; however, this past couple of times we have struggled. We got access to a client’s Facebook Page as an “Admin“, so we should be set. We logged into Facebook under our account, went to the clients’s page, and verified we could manage the page. In WordPress we started our “feed“. We clicked on the “Login and Get my Access Token“.
We get the login for our account. We hit “Continue as Esceedie” our Facebook account.
The screen would appear to be working and would return to the “Facebook Access Token” page as before. The plugin instructions said below this “Facebook Access Token” there will be a list of the pages/accounts we have access to and to pick one. We had no accounts showing.
If we left the plugin settings page and came back into the plugin’s feed section, we would see the “Access Token” wasn’t working.
So confused we jumped over to Developers.Facebook.com and started creating a new App to try to get an “Access Token” the only way we knew how to create one. Once we had an access token we used the following URL to verify the Access Token, which did not verify.
This was good because it got it the Page ID, and User Name. We used these two pieces in the “Settings” tab, and then generated the access token. In the App we went to Tools >> Graph API Explorer. We selected the “Meta App” we are working on and added the following “User Page“.
Then generated an Access Token. We copied that Access Token and went to Tools >> Access Token Debugger. Pasted the access token in the debugger. Then Extended the token expiration date.
It took a couple of tries and we ended up getting a green bar to “Create Facebook Feed“.
We clicked on the green bar, and now got the following screen.
Now we pasted the feed shortcode into the page; however, nothing showed on the front end.
We went back to “Feed” settings to generate the access code again, and somehow this caused it to work better. We were notified there was an issue and to remove “slickremix” from the app. Once we did everything was working. Still not exactly sure how to we got it to work.
We have enjoyed the functions and price of Ninja Forms when working in WordPress; however, recently we moved a site from “Development” into “Production” and we got the following error message:
This form is currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again later.
Googling didn’t get us anywhere quick. Even on the Ninja forms website. We got it working quickly again by simply “duplicating” the form in the backend and changing the form number on the front end. Everything was working perfectly again.
