SCDIT Blog

We have a customer that needs to move their website to a new hosting company. The site is a .NET Umbraco site with a MS SQL database which is not so common these days. The customer was looking for our advice and we found Hostgator offers Windows hosting with Plesk and MS SQL at a reasonable cost. We suggest HostGator and their developer agreed it is a good company.

Getting the hosting purchased and set up took no time at all; however, getting the access the MS SQL requires you to request credentials. It took overnight before we got the credentials. It was straight forward to export the existing database by right-clicking on the database >> Tasks >> Export data. Importing the data on the plesk side was straight forward.

Once the files were moved over and the database was installed we just needed to change the web.config file to new database connection string. We gave the customer’s IT team the nameserver addresses and IP address, and the site was on the new host. We find HostGator to have fast hosting, but the Umbraco site seemed slow. We ran Google’s page insights and they came back good. We also noticed Umbraco didn’t run well in Firefox, but fine in Chrome.

HostGator offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL so we requested it get installed. HostGator said this was causing the site to not resolve to the home directory. They suggested we purchase the $39 SSL, but this too wasn’t working out. They suggested we purchase the full $69 SSL, so we did. They we got an email from HostGator saying the Free Let’s Encrypt SSL was installed.

Excited we went to the site and it was running terribly. We were constantly getting 503 service unavailable errors. HostGator tech support suggested switch to 32-bit app pool and using the database to handle the sessions. Once the app pool and session handling was changed the site was running great. No more 503 errors. HostGator refunded the full SSL.

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We received a FAX from BlueRocketSeo.net that was an invoice for SEO/Link Building services. The problem is we don’t use anyone to do our SEO, so this is a total scam. They want $99.58 for their “service”. They want you to mail your payments to:

620 Murphy Road
Suite #208
Stafford, TX 77477

If you get a FAX or letter like this totally disregard it. We are submitting this scam to the Better Business Bureau. We are just glad we didn’t also get a late fee.

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We were looking for CSS Text Shadow example that we could use for a project. We came across this resource from DesignShack.com. They posted great examples and you can just copy and paste their CSS. Take a look at their work.

Fun CSS Text Shadows

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We get these letters in the mail stating our domain is set to expire; fortunately, we stay on top of domain registry so we know when it is going to expire. We just want everyone to be aware this is a scam.

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We have a Joomla 4 site we are working on and the customer wanted to show their Instagram photo feed. We didn’t budget this in, but wanted the customer to be satisfied. We found a way to do it for Free! The solution came from Unitemplates. Of course it is never easy to get your Instagram Access Token. You will also need the username for this module.

Here is a link to a YouTube video by Go Tech UG that shows you how to get your access Token: Video here.

From there is extremely easy. Just install the module, add your access token and username.

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We were trying out a new free component for Joomla called “Event Gallery”; however, the local images were not showing up for us at first. We created one gallery that pulls from our Google Photos account, and that worked. The second gallery pulled from local images that we uploaded, but this didn’t work. Here is what we would see.

Inspecting the broken link the URL looked right, but still no image. After digging around on the developers website we found the following ticket that gave us our answer.

https://www.svenbluege.de/support/general/4224-images-are-not-shown

We were building the site in XXAMP and discovered our PHP.ini needed to allow the extension “gd” enabled.

We restarted Apache in XXAMP and everything was working.

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While working on a drawing in AutoCAD LT we got the following error.

We started with a simple restart, but this did not clear up the error. We did a quick search on the web and came across the following page from AutoCAD.

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/When-you-launch-the-application-a-temporary-files-error-displays.html

We would need to contact our tech support to run the program as an Administrator, so before we contacted them we tried the following first.

• “Rename” – the file in the RSA folder in the users directory.
• “Delete” – out the cache in the Windows Directory.

One issue that may be holding us up is the original PDF we received didn’t have the fonts embedded or did they use system fonts. The fonts showed up a squares if we just tried to import the PDF. We ended up exporting the sheet we needed out of Photoshop. We believe the “rasterizing” of the drawing caused the issue; although, we have done this in the past.

Well after too much time we found the file we were working with must be corrupt. We started over from our drawing template and everything worked fine.

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The job feed just stopped working for us. Indeed wants to sign up and create a developers account. You do this by going to the following link.

• Go the the following page to create an account:
  https://pubwebapp.indeed.com/jobroll/traffic

The following article was a help to us. For scraping the webpage and selecting out the “items” we wanted to display. This worked on most pages; however, Indeed blocks these requests for security reasons.

https://www.eleganttweaks.com/adding-indeed-jobs-website/

After wasting a bunch of time waiting for Indeed to approve our account we found another service that is working well-ish for us. It was Sociablekit.com. It didn’t take long before our job listings were being displayed on our website again. Here is a link to their website.

https://www.sociablekit.com/tutorials/embed-indeed-jobs-website/#thank-you

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