A series of six blog posts detailing an upgrade to our services in the first part of 2022. Thank you for being a Gap Creek Media client :)
This year we began with a blog about revamping our services on all managed websites. Some of those changes were followed by a secondary change, and some went very well. This blog post recaps what the revamp was all about and what the results were when the dust settled. But, of course, we will always be in a state of improvement, so these blog posts are never intended as a conclusion but more of...
During the month of August, we moved all managed websites over to new Virtual Machines. The reason for this move is that some websites were experiencing downtime. We attributed the downtime to running out of disk space on each instance, which were set at 10GB. When we looked at the space being taken up, it was due to excessive logging by MySQL and Google Cloud related software. The configuration that created this scenario was...
If you've been keeping up with our blogs, you know that we recently migrated to WP Engine for our hosting. While WP Engine did fix a lot of the problems we had with GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting, moving to WP Engine brought new problems. WP Engine is moving to a new network layer of security that comes with features that aren't really features for us. One feature, Cloudflare Polish, strips metadata from images to...
I looked over Termageddon and another competitor and for now I am going to continue creating basic Privacy Policy and Terms of Service pages myself. While I am not an attorney, I care about our website visitors. I found that Termageddon provided very thin and obscure information and that other plugins are overwhelming in their legalese. There are legal criteria for these terms and policies that include notifying users about the information you are...
The liability landscape for privacy and tracking has been unstable for a while now and will continue to be for some time. As a result, we have had a zero-collection policy for anything that could be identifiable or personal information and have strong notification and agreement protections in place for form submissions. Unfortunately, this left us ditching Google Analytics, and since then, we have been using a plugin with less capability, WP-Statistics. However, that...
Update: We have since moved our hosting to Google Cloud. Read the update. We addressed improved security in a separate blog post. Read the update. We are moving from GoDaddy hosting to WP Engine Secure WordPress Hosting on a dedicated server. Having a dedicated server means that your website will not share computer hardware space with other websites as it does now. Instead, we will have dedicated resources, and as a result, your website...
Bing Places and Bing Webmaster tools were hobbled with dysfunction until the middle of this past year and were not available for reliable functionality. Now Bing Webmaster Tools has had a significant facelift and is as useful as Google Search Console for diagnosing potential SEO and performance improvements. We sent emails about looking for your Bing postcard in the mail. The postcard will have a PIN that we need to complete verification to manage...
Update: Due to planned improvements with Rackspace Cloud Office products the decision was made to stay with Rackspace email and cloud services. We recently upgraded all email accounts from Rackspace Email to Rackspace Email Plus, which allows our clients to use ActiveSync to access their accounts. We did this because some clients had issues adding the email to their device(s) otherwise. This service has the additional benefit of allowing clients to synchronize contacts and...
Update: During the test drive of this product, we found this product was not the best approach and the product was never rolled out to managed websites. Read the update. I could have titled this "The Inconsistency of Online Privacy Law." Unfortunately, that is the problem, we need a clear legal outline that is a matter of steps to follow. However, currently, these laws are all over the place between nations and states, some...
Over the next few months, we plan to adopt services and technologies that we have been keeping an eye on since shortly after we began our journey. We have already taken advantage of advancements made by the software vendors that we already work with, such as new features from SiteOrigin that allow us to create an entirely different layout for individual page sections for mobile and desktop devices. We also added visual enhancements such...
