End of the Year Projects

In this post, there is no video, nothing technical, no reviews, just a little rant on why I am always so busy towards the end of the year.
This trend has been going on for the past 3 or 4 years and I just don’t know why it is.
I would rather have these tasks spread out through the year instead of being crammed into the last three months.

But I really have no complaints, as there are still thousands without work since the pandemic hit way back in March.
I was in the process of refreshing Frontntweaks.com, as it is quite a few years old.
It is put on hold again, as I can only work on it when I have downtime.
So I may not be able to complete this refresh till 2021.

I need to remind myself that there is always something new to learn in each situation and circumstance.
So what has kept me busy in this last quarter?
Here are some of the tasks that has kept me busy:

Ecommerce
Just finished an ecommerce site, and I discovered that setting up and syncing payments is much easier today.
Third party payment gateways are much more secure with Square, Stripe and Paypal.
Integration has come such a long since when I first began contructing ecommerce sites years ago.
In addition, the shipping modules has also vastly improved making the configuration a pleasant experience.

Webmail Troubleshooting
A Business owner had problems with his server based webmail.
Like most small businesses, they use the webmail that comes with their account, as it is easy to set up a custom
email address with the business name within the email address (i.e. [email protected]).

His email was working great then suddenly, He stopped receiving email altogether.
It was perplexing, because they rely on email and it was a cause for concern.
So in looking into this matter, I discovered that the domain was being transferred to another hosting service.
In other words, they were planning to move the website to a new host.

The domain was unlocked and the DNS was already pointing to the new servers.
Aha, since the domain was in limbo, the email did not know where to go.
To make a long story short, they decided to cancel both the new hosting account and domain transfer.
I reset everything back to where everything started, and the webmail was once again functioning as it should.

Lesson learned: before migrating a domain to another server, backup, export or delete all your webmail.
Just something we all tend to overlook.

Real Estate Website
Currently, I have a project to build a real estate site.
The owner wants a WordPress platform so I am researching themes and plugins.
As of this blog, I am testing various real estate plugins and themes that may fit the need on my staging site.
Since it’s been quite a while since I did anything related to real estate, I have found there is so much
to research, in finding what fits the business owners needs.

I have already built my own layout using a page builder, but have found that maybe I
should use a theme designed for real estate.
Many of them come bundled with the necessary plugins that are optimized to create an awesome site.

So we shall see how this journey goes.

Restore Headless WordPress to Original Status
I had two inquiries on resetting two different websites back to it’s original out of the box WordPress setup.

1) The developer of the first business, moved on, and stopped providing support.
The business owner did not know how to update his website, and in frustration wanted the website
returned to its original state so he could do his own updates.
Later, I received an email explaining that the developer decided to continue supporting this store owner.
I don’t have any idea of what transpired, but as long as the business owner is satisfied is what counts.

2) Another business owner also wanted his site restored to the original WordPress status.
The developer in this case actually left the web development business into another profession.
I believe all tied to the world wide pandemic situation.
In any case to quickly restore this website, I was able to obtain a older backup copy of this website.
I first took screen shots of all the pertain pages so I could have the latest content available.
Next, I completeIy deleted WordPress and related files on the server.
Using the backup, I restored WordPress to its stock original setup.

Yes it took a while to update all the content, but this is what the owner wanted.
In fact I am not totally done yet.

Now was this the correct process to restore this WordPress site, I don’t know but in the end it worked.

Hacked WordPress Sites
To my surprise, there have been no requests to restore compromised WordPress sites since summer.
Of course the year is far from over, so you never know what voicemail or email I may have waiting for me.
Restoring these sites have kept me busy since the beginning of the year.

Finally, I truly hope all is well with you, your family, your co-workers, your fellow students, your neighbors, and your friends.
Always encourage each other………

“Sunshine is the best medicine out there, don’t steal it from others.”
― Christine E. Szymanski