My work in July kept me quite busy and was quite profitable. A number of projects for clients started earlier continued in July, but some concluded. It’s hard to remember all the details and clients, so I will be more succinct than usual.
I’ve been getting a lot of Aussie clients lately. Not sure what’s going on. Maybe my name is being passed around by word of mouth. I live in the United States but likely 75% of my work is foreign. It used to be mostly for clients in Europe. Lately it’s been more in Asia: Australia and the Philippines in particular. The time difference is a challenge but it can be an advantage too. The larger, hairy jobs are usually complex upgrades. I can work in the day while the board is offline in the night halfway around the world.
After a slow April and May, I’m now more than caught up with my revenue goal. If the rest of the year continues the way the first seven months have, I should surpass my 2018 revenue by a bit.
- More work for a client I’ve had for a few years now. Originally I worked on her forum, which is now dormant. Now I mostly help her with hosting and domain issues. I completed the domain registry transfer of one of her domains from GoDaddy. Not sure why it didn’t happen last year as I thought it was taken care of. It’s a .ca domain and they make you wait 60 days between registry transfers. Also, her Let’s Encrypt certificate kept failing. I generated a new one in cPanel on her web host. I also assisted in the procurement of another domain she had. A “friend” of hers controlled the domain and wouldn’t release it. It expired, she bought it, and I redirected it to a new domain.
- I finally got paid for two reseller commissions by siteground.com. I appreciate clients who use my affiliate link. You don’t pay more and I netted $100.
- More work for an Aussie client I did work for last month: same domain, just more tweaks. I had it all on a spreadsheet but I deleted the spreadsheet, so I don’t recall the details. But it was a significant amount of work for which I was paid $300.
- I redid all the work I did for a client last December. It was a strange case of moving and converting a phpBB 2 forum. He had the extract I provided back then, just never got around to rehosting it. Meanwhile, users kept posting on the forum, so I did it again. Client lives in the United Kingdom.
- Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.2.4 to 3.2.7. FTP seemed flaky. Also, there was an issue getting into the ACP after the update. I had to upload the media embed extension using the cPanel file manager instead of FTP because it was flakey. I also needed to use cPanel to turn off SuperCache for the logo to reappear.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.2.7. No issues. A couple weeks later, I also updated the advertisement management extension.
- Did something that was actually unusual: an installation of phpBB on a new server. It will be a brand new forum! Client spun up a server just for the forum. Very nice client and paid very well. There was plenty of work aside from just installing phpBB. Work included: long requirements discussion, installing phpBB 3.2.7, resolving some issues with FTP and SSH, working around an iconv() error I’ve encountered before (no real solution has been addressed), creating the requested forums, the requested groups and assigned appropriate forum permissions. Client also paid for three hours of future time when issues or changes are needed.
- Another huge job, for another Aussie client, that is not quite complete.
- In part one, I updated their forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.7. The major issue is that email notifications exceeded the web host’s quota and buying more email quota is not allowed, so emailing needed to be staggered using a system cron. The mailing program in phpBB, /includes/functions_messenger.php was renamed by web host technical support to stop emails from going out. They looked like spam to the web host. Made a phpBB email package size of 50 because hourly quota is 500 emails, so 50 emails every 5 minutes should keep him under quota. But doing a system cron on Windows proved impossible on this particular web host. I asked my client if there was a compelling reason not to move from a Microsoft server to a Linux server. I should be able to program a system cron there and thus address the staggered emailing issue because the technical limitations won’t exist on the Linux server
- In part two, the client takes my advice and makes the leap to a Linux server, which meant moving a number of domains, forums, one Wiki and a host of other content including a Joomla front end. Client’s web host was not terribly responsive to his needs, which meant lots of fruitless back and forth emails. The project is mostly done but there are a few loose ends. There is a huge 6GB MySQL database tied to a Wiki that uses Microsoft ASP. Client understands the Wiki won’t be accessible on Linux but doesn’t care too much, just wants to retain the data. It was too big for me to move with the only tool I had (Plesk). Web host tried and failed too. There may be integrity issues with the database. So that’s still going on, and I’m waiting on some information to program the system cron which because I asked is 200 emails per hour per domain, 500 per hour for all domains hosted for the client. But I did move over three phpBB forums including the databases, one Joomla front end and lot of static pages. This seems to keep going on and one, but hopefully I’ll report a successful conclusion in my August report.
- Troubleshooting on phpBB 3.0.12 forum. The client, an administrator, could not login or access the ACP. I registered as myself with no issues. Via the database, I gave myself founder privileges. But I didn’t see the ACP link. I had to copy the phpbb_users.user_permissions value in the database from an administrator’s permissions to get the ACP link. I changed his password in the ACP and provided an idea of the cost to upgrade to phpBB 3.2.7. That work may show up in a future report.
- Installed a SSL certificate for domain.
- A client’s third party script was failing. I thought it was because old mysql driver calls were in the code, but the real problem was that a common include file containing the database access information referenced the database server name and it was not localhost. Made it 127.0.0.1 to match the phpBB config.php file and the scripts started working.
- Spent about 90 minutes online tutoring a client who had taken over a large forum. The web host is flaky. I showed her how to backup database and files on her hosting. I also made backup of the database and files and posted them to Google Drive. The Network Solutions file manager could not make an archive to contain all the files, so I had to download all the files using FTP and create the archive myself. It turned out to be 16GB, so I paid for extra space on my Google Drive to transfer them to her. My slow Comcast upload speed though meant it took over three hours to upload!
- Additional labor for a client I did a lot of work for last month. Mostly I answered lots of questions. I created a special report for her using SQL and phpMyAdmin. It shows duplicate posts, many of which are spam posts. Her moderators will go through all 600 of them manually and remove the obviously spammy ones. She wants a clean board again. I also removed a style credit line from footer of her forum.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.7. The client will take care of updating the prosilver_se style with his changes and one extension.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.2.7. The site uses a proprietary SiteSplat style. There was also an error on the manage extensions page. I had to go into the database and remove the bogus extension from the phpbb_ext table, and then purge the cache for the issue to go away. I did not update style or the SiteSplat extension.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.2.7. I also updated the following extensions: Advanced BBCode, phpBB Media Embed, Cleantalk and Tapatalk. I disabled the beta Copy new topic extension that I had installed some months ago for the client. No issues, but the proprietary Dreamhost web host control panel took quite a while to puzzle through — I really don’t like it, it’s so confusing! The FTP settings I had no longer works, so I had to figure out correct FTP settings again.
