Outlook Web App Locking Up

We got a call from a user saying the computer was locked up. When we connected we say several applications open and several browser windows open. One of the Browser Windows was Chrome and it was looking to “Choose a file” to upload. That window was unresponsive; however, the other browser windows and application were actually behaving fine. We used the EventViewer to see if there were any application errors and there were several related to Chrome.

Since the Chrome window doing the upload was the only window not working we assumed this was the right path. The details in the Event lead us to Control Panel >> Security and Maintenance section.

In this Security and Maintenance section we could see “AppHang81” event with Chrome.

We found the following article that help us with some possible solutions.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/outlook-crashing-apphangb1-error/7c91a060-716c-4c9a-be76-71aee0bb5d36

This article goes into the “Add-ins” into Outlook Web App and disabling them.

We will check with the user after a few days to see if this totally resolved their issue.

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Word Default To Bypass Tray & Page 2 Blank

We came across this issue while dealing with a Word Document where no matter what we set the printer properties and printer preferences the paper was pulling from the bypass tray. Another issue was after the first page the next page was blank, but the rest was okay. We were able to get this resolved by going into the “page setup” link.

You will see this when you hit the print button.

In the Page Setup on the second tab “Paper” we had to specify “auto” and take it off of “Default tray (Bypasss Tray)“.

Set this both of these to “Auto“.

The next issue was after the first page it was printing a blank page and then the rest of the document. We solved this by going into the “Layout” tab.

Change section Start to “Continuous“.

In the Layout tab change Section Start to “Continuous“.

Let us know if this helped you….

WordPress Block Page From Search Engines

We enjoy using WordPress because it is so friendly with Search Engines; however, what if you have a page you want public but not indexed? There are a number of ways to do this and adding a code to a “header.php” file in your child-theme, but this gets messy. The plug-ins we used in the past are no longer in development. Well everything we needed to achieve this was already installed and it is in Yoast SEO.

  • In the Admin section go to the page you want to block.
  • Expand the Yoast SEO tab.
  • Go down to Advanced and expand it.
  • In the “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?” set this to “NO“, and the “Should search engines follow links on this Post” to “No

If you look at the source code of the page you will see the meta data for indexing is set to NOT INDEX.

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Google URL Inspection Is Not In Google

We worked on improving the SEO of a page, so when we were finished we removed the old URL and submitted the new one. This was a mistake. We would recommended waiting till the new page has been indexed before removing the old page. The reason for this is that critical page was not indexed at all for a month. The reason for this was there was an error on the page that we didn’t notice Google was warning us. This was on the URL Inspection page.

We overlooked the text stating “because of an error.”, and we keep hitting the “Request Indexing” button. After a few weeks the page never got indexed. We decided to click on the “TEST LIVE URL” button. When we did this we got a completely different screen saying the page is available for indexing. Once it was done we now see this page.

Finally got things moving forward. We are looking forward to seeing new results.

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DIVI Has Improved Page Speed Load Times

DIVI is fun to work with, and the latest update has greatly improved the load times on your pages. We took a DIVI site and ran it through Google’s Page Insights. Our initial numbers were so-so. We need to improve a few things. We don’t like page score below 80 on Desktop and 40 on Mobile. Our first run without the DIVI update gave us the following numbers.

Desktop59
Mobile21
Google Page Insights Score

We deleted out the cache and installed the DIVI update, and that one change made a big difference.

Desktop75
Mobile44
Google Page Insights Score

Not a huge change, but what an improvement! With Google putting more weight into Mobile-first indexing this is a huge help. If you are running a DIVI site and haven’t updated you should do it, and use Page Insights to measure the difference. We think you will be please.

Let us know if this helps you.

Don’t Upgrade Joomla 3.9.28 to 4 Just Yet

We try to stay on top of the 3 major Content Management Systems of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. This week was a big announcement from Joomla that version 4 is ready. We took a copy of a Joomla 3.9.28 and installed it in a XXAMP environment. We set the Joomla Update “options” in the “next” from the “default” and was prompted to upgrade straight to version 4. This would skip version 3.10. We went for it and it failed at the end of the update. Site was broken at that point. We are suggesting holding off from upgrading to version 4 at this moment.

We tried going from 3.9.28 to 3.10 and everything worked fine. We knew our Gantry 5 template wasn’t Joomla 4 ready, so we switched our templates to Protostar, and tried to got to version 4. The upgrade failed at this as well. We tried disabling most of the plug-ins we installed and this didn’t help. RocketThemes the maker of Gantry offers upgraded pieces you can replace your existing Gantry template to be Joomla 4 ready. We are going to try these and see if this helps. We hope to have an update for you. Here is the link to their GIT page with this information.

https://github.com/gantry/gantry5/blob/feature/v5.5.0/Joomla4-support.md

Although we haven’t spent much time on this effort yet we would advise before you upgrade test the site locally first. At this time we are advising against upgrading to Joomla 4 at this time.

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MS Word Suggesting French words

While typing up a contract we noticed Word put a red squiggly line under the word “subcontractor“. We looked to see what was wrong and Word was suggesting a french spelling of the word. The word “subcontractor” was throughout the document; however, it didn’t have a problem with those, just the ones on this one page. We fixed this by doing the following:

  • Go to the “Review” tab
  • Click on the “Language” button
  • Choose “Set Proofing Language“.
  • Select your Language preference, and check the box “Detect Language automatically“.

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Optimize My Website with Page Insights

We look at how fast our website loads and generally try to keep the load times under 7 seconds. Some people want the sites to load faster, but we do have a fair amount of content to display on the home page plus Google Analytics, a Translation widget, and we pull a couple of RSS feeds. We have often used Google’s PageInsights to get a general idea of where we can shed some weight from our site.

Today while doing a check on our site I see PageInsights has added “view treemap” button which takes you to Google’s Lighthouse. This was incredible handy to get a big picture of what is taking up the most bandwidth. Here is what we saw.

We can see the “translation” widget is too large for us to use. We are using the Google TagManager widget, that we are going to stop using since our site has a tag component built-in.

Simply turning these items off took our page score from 69 to 83. Still not in the Green; however, pretty good. Using the new “Treemap” is awesome.

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AutoCAD crazy lines importing PDF

This doesn’t happen to us all the time, but sometimes after importing a PDF drawing into AutoCAD there are lines connecting objects that shouldn’t be there. The lines didn’t show in other programs. This turned out to be a simple setting in our AutoCAD. We needed to turn off “linesmoothing”. Here is the article we used to fix our issue.

In AutoCAD go down to the command line and type in “linesmoothing” and hit enter. Next type in “off” and hit enter. Import the PDF again and the lines should be gone.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Unwanted-linework-appears-when-opening-drawings-in-AutoCAD-2015.html

Let us know if this helped you.

WordPress 5.8 Update Could Not Be Verified

While working on a WordPress site we were prompted to update to 5.8, but the manually pushing the button to update keep failing. The process would start, but would run into errors and stop. We tried just manually moving the directories “wp-admin” and “wp-includes” from a downloaded zip of the latest version, but this didn’t help. We ended up fixing everything by removing a few plugins we had installed and were not using. Once this was done the update button worked fine. On screen the update got to the end and read “updating database…” and hung there, but going back to the Dashboard everything was fine. The site was updated to 5.8 and running fine.

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