I finally got smart and gave up on Lunarpages hosting service. Even with all they said they did, their security was SEVERELY lacking. All but maybe on or two secondary sites have been moved to InMotion Hosting. Much more expensive, but so far it’s been worth it. Unfortunately I will have to pass this cost along to clients when their renewal period rolls around. No new clients as of late. I really don’t want any right now. The current ones are keeping me fairly busy and I have a full schedule outside of C&H and Upstairs Room.

I did some extra KASA “commercials” for them this year for their upcoming Leadership Development Institute they have each year including the usual Fred Awards videos for 2016. I moved all of the past Fred nominee videos to Youtube during the Lunarpages trouble.

Lots of other things happening including renovating the old Transform Us bus into new (permanent) living quarters. Lots of trade skills needed there. Design, Carpentry, Electrical, Plumbing, Etc… and even Welding. I am trying to learn enough welding to get the needed work done myself. Time will tell. Overall, the project is coming along well despite some distractions and hopefully will be done and moved into by this fall sometime. When all is done, I will share some photos of the process along the way.

I’ve had some distractions, but distractions like this out the back window are nice though…

Wow, I can’t believe how stupid some people are. Why do you want to break into MY website?

Apparently hacking into WordPress based websites is the latest thing. Over the last several months, WordPress websites around the world have been targeted by these thieves. I recently dealt with this on approximately 25 websites. They got it and planted THOUSANDS of their own files within my file structure pointing to their own eCommerce websites. Using MY hosting, MY bandwidth all for their own. Thieves. Much of the problem with my hosting provider occurred simply because of the amount of ATTEMPTS. It was easy to stop the intrusions into the websites, not so easy to stop them from ATTEMPTING. The attempts themselves is what can overload a server CPU.

As I said, I’m not the only one. This has occurred around the globe, so there was plenty of help to be found thanks to Google, FB and forums, since WordPress is used to create 58.6% of all Content Management System websites (blogs and user manageable websites). That also means that WordPress is used to manage 24.9% of ALL websites. ALL websites.

My host provider was not of much help… at first. They kept telling me my CPU usage of their server was too great and at least twice my account was suspended and ALL of my websites were down. This was unacceptable as some clients rely greatly on their websites for business purposes. They kept telling me that for $34.95 PER MONTH, they could have someone assist me in cleaning up the websites and applying security. No thanks, I can do this myself.

I won’t go into details, but after MANY late hours I finally got .htaccess files applied correctly and a great security plugin configured for all websites.

After going through the sites and adding security in MANY different ways, the hosting provider finally helped out by adding a CAPTCHA to my directories. I was grateful for that because I did not have access to do that myself on that level. But too late. Even though I just renewed my hosting with them in July for the next three years, I found a new host that cares a bit more and does lots of the background security without me having to deal with it. A bit more expensive, but far less than the monthly fee plus the additional $34.95 the old host wanted to do less.

Lots of headaches over. Still finalizing getting all the websites moved over, but each has been successful so far.

Along with this move, I have implemented upstairsroom.COM as my main website, while keeping upstairsroom.NET as an alias instead of the other way around. This helps to keep any established search engine entries working.

Fred award videos will be starting soon for KASA with a June 15 deadline.

Elaine has returned to Gerber Scout Reservation for a second year as Aquatics Director. I will be joining her for about 3-4 weeks in June-July after the KASA videos are completed.

Finally temporarily living in our dream home (on wheels) sorta. It’s a travel trailer, but we are not mobile as we would like to be as it is a fifth wheel camper and we only have 4 wheels… baby steps…

There is currently no physical “upstairs room”. It’s more of a “workspace”… It’s not upstairs and it’s not a room, but that’s OK.
A major overhaul of C&H website leads me into the realm of Genesis for WordPress and HTML5. Including parallax programming. Very cool. The new www.chavs.net launches this week.

Lots of minor work/maintenance on the ol’ van is about done. It will be ready for the summer road trip whether it likes it or not. New front struts, wheel bearing/hubs, bushings, tie rods, ball joints, rotors, radiator. Rear air shocks, repaired auto-ride-level control, brakes. Maybe even some new-ish rubber all around before then.

Yes, it’s been quite a while since last post, but I’ll keep it short.

Not in order of importance or chronological, but short…

– I fixed the Montana. Head/intake gaskets, tune-up and a few other items while it was apart. Running great except for a recently developed explainable random misfire between 1500-1900 RPM. Contact me if you have any ideas on this.

– Sold the truck.

– Bought a KIA Sedona for CHEAP to replace the truck as a third vehicle.

– Gabe bought a motorcycle. Did some work on that.

– Elaine served in western Michigan at Gerber Scout Reservation as aquatics Director and I visited her for a long weekend.

– Visited Wise, VA for a possible position for Elaine as Youth Director for a new satellite church plant. Did not work out though.

– KASA Fred videos for 2014.

– Updated to Windows 7 Pro 64bit onto a 250GB Solid State Drive. I recommend a SSD !

– Elaine sold her gas-guzzling Mountaineer and bought a gas-saving 1989 Honda Prelude. She loves it. It’s loud.

– Sold the house.

– Stored some belongings we had left after yard sale. Trying to get rid of all absolutely unnecessary clutter.

– Moved. Twice. Last move was to a location where we are helping friends with a major cleaning/purging of a household. Ultimately allowing them to sell the home and travel. This will be an ongoing project for quite some time. This meanwhile is helping us to achieve our goal of becoming debt-free and moving to full-time camp ministry.

– Created a couple more websites.

– Mom’s skin cancer returned. This time on her chin. Doc got it all taken care of and she’s doing fairly well. Still some health issues.

– other…

Not much happening as of late. Spent alot of time helping Elaine in taking care of Mom over the last few months. We are ALL very blessed that she was able to have the time to live with and take care of Mom 24/7 for several months. None of Mom’s “boys” could do that like Elaine did. Mom is doing very well and is getting great doctor reports.

Also, I’ve had a broken down mini van in my drive for months. I was keeping it to use for parts when I bought another, however, it just happened to start and run a couple weeks ago when I was checking the physical condition of the motor, so I have begun to replace head gaskets, which has turned into more that just head gaskets. Why not replace a few other things while it’s stripped down? Timing chain/gears, water pump, head reconditioning, plugs (they were original with 250K), coils, Serpentine belt, clean the fuel injectors, all new gaskets and more… very time consuming since the weather can’t stay warm/dry.

Meanwhile, I purchased a very cheap junker truck back in December to have to drive until I could replace the van. Getting all the paperwork from the young man in Indiana took nearly 3 months! The tags were expired IN tags or I would have been driving it anyway. Now that I finally have it on the road, I discover it’s getting 11 mpg. More motivation to get the van running again!

Lost a hard drive to age, but didn’t lose any info thanks to backup drive! New 1TB installed. Soon I’ll have to upgrade to Windows 7 which means a fresh install and losing all of my video editing presets…. 🙁 However, with the installation, I’ll probably move to a solid state system drive, upgrade my processor to a quad core and go with 16GB of DRAM.

This week I finished up another video project for KASA introducing KY School Administrators to connect.kasa.org. An online community for all of KY Admins across the state. The project included a presentation video and a looping video to be used at trade shows. This was a little different as I worked with their marketing consultant on this one. Everyone was satisfied with the results. www.upstairsroom.com/KASA/connect and www.upstairsroom.com/KASA/connectloop

KASA Fred videos again this year starting soon.

I also just finished up an iOS/Android app for C & H employee use. I started this back in October but waited until January to get serious on it. While it was done with an online design website, it was still taxing and I learned much about Apple and their iTunes store and Developer accounts! The app kept getting rejected because it was for “employees only”. There are other ways of distributing the app to employees, but all are very detailed and the online design package was giving me fits doing it this way. Plus it required yet ANOTHER type of Apple Developer license. So after 3 months, I finally figured out that I can make the app generic with public content, then after approval, edit it to allow for employee specific info. This also allow me to password protect it for my specific employee users. So, since the app is password protected, you can’t really see how it works… but here’s the iTunes page for it. www.chavs.net/app

I did some more work for a friend in Virginia in closing out a webpage because of a necessary business name change. New site, same design. www.911CASPER.com

Looking for more local small businesses that need website work. Have one possibility, but have not made a decision yet.