Over the next couple of weeks, our site will be undergoing a slow process of change and update. There won’t be a whole lot of change in the look, but there will be change in the content and the functionality.

Currently, GeekNiche.com is a series of php & html pages written by yours truly about 3 years ago. The news section (what you’re reading right now) is a WordPress blog. WordPress has come a long way in the last 3 years. I’ve been recommending WP as a great CMS (Content Management System) to for new clients. Well… I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: I’m converting the entire site over to a WP-driven site (well… not the [i]entire[/i] site; there are some areas that need to remain as they are).

Why am I telling you this? Because over the next couple weeks, you may see some strange things (such as duplicate pages), and I just wanted you to know why.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
Chief Tinkerer
Geek Niche, Inc.

Good news for you and your friends. The holidays are here and we’re getting in the spirit. We’re celebrating the 12 Days of Geekmas by giving out presents. No… it’s not the Cylon Snowman. It’s money! (sort of)

Starting Dec 25th, and running through Jan 6th, we’re offering a little present to new members. $15 off any new account. Just use the coupon code 12geekmas07.

That’s the present for your friends. What about the presents for you?

Well….Nothing says “holiday spirit” like kickbacks! As always, tell a friend about us, and if they sign up, you get 10% of their monthly bill taken off of yours. Get 10 friends to sign up at your level, and you’ll be hosted for free. Just tell your friends to let us know who sent them, and we’ll do the rest.

Have a happy Geekmas!

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M Blaze Miskulin
Santa’s Little Helper

While you’ve all been looking for the best Christmas presents, we’ve been wrapping up some new presents for you.

If you log in to your control panel, you’ll notice something new in the sidebar. It’s called 4psa Integrator. At this point you’re asking “What is this new feature? What does it do? Well… I’m here to tell you! (Convenient, isn’t it?)

4psa Integrator is a replacement for the Application Vault. It’s the new “one click” installation tool. Not only does it have more applications to offer, it has much more recent versions.

The Ap Vault has been always been a bit of a let-down for us. It’s always been far behind the times with version updates. In the world of internet applications, this can be a serious issue. Integrator takes care of that.

If you’re looking to install a new application, use the Integrator. It’s a nice and simple way to set up the best applications on your site.

If you’ve got any questions, let me know.

–
Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

A grand welcome to all of you coming from Something Positive.

When we signed up for an ad, we decided to let Randy do whatever he wanted (though Paul insisted on using the Little Blue Thing in the ad), and let him know that we’re not above making fun of ourselves. The result is great!

A big thanks to Randy and the crew at Something Positive.

From Christmas day through January 6, if you refer a friend, they get $15 off their set-up fee, and you get $10 off your next month’s bill.

Tell your friend to use the coupon code “Stocking Stuffer” for their discount–and make sure they e-mail me so you get your $10 off. And… if they stick around for 3 months or more, you still get your kickback.

Ain’t it just a joyous season to be a Geek Niche Customer?

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Chief Elf
Geek Niche, Inc.

Yes, spam is getting worse. A flood of new “bots” and and other nefarious programs have started a new offensive (and it is very offensive) against our inboxes. Unfortunately, there’s not much that we can do about it right now. By using “zombies” (innocent computers taken over by viruses) and creating e-mails that are very difficult for automatic filters to differentiate from real e-mail, the spam creators are able to ignore most of the defenses we have. A leading corporate e-mail provider claims that 91% of the traffic that passes through their servers is spam.

Here at Geek Niche, our filtering ability is at its limit. Pushing our defenses higher risks deleting real e-mails. If this new wave of spam turns out to be more than a short-term spike, we’ll look at alternate, more aggressive, means of filtering–even though we run the risk of catching real e-mails in the filters.

Things should be all ship-shape and bristol-fashion now (Well…with the exception of my personal site–which we purposely broke to see how things were breaking–and this blog–because the clients come first).

Part of the problem appears to be that a lot of the applications and themes being used aren’t coded properly, so the new stricter rules broke them. New installs of Gallery should work fine (if they don’t, please tell me!). However, there’s a bit of an issue with the Ap Vault version of WordPress. Plesk included a version that doesn’t like to play well with Plesk. I’ll be looking into this promptly. Installs by hand should work however. Until we can get this issue resolved with our software provider, feel free to let me know if you need a copy of WordPress installed. I can have one up and running usually within 12 hours (a whole lot sooner if you catch me when I’m not tied up in the office).

Some old WP themes won’t work. Their code contains a line that’s considered a security flaw.

If you run across any errors on your sites, please let us know so we can fix them promptly.

–
Blaze

I think I’ve found a temporary (if inelegant) fix for the problem of WordPress not showing up.

Go to your blog (or where your blog should be) and add “/wp-admin/” at the end of the url. So, you’ll have an address like this:

http://www.domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/

You should see the login screen. Log in, go to the “presentation” tab. Select the “WordPress Classic” theme as your active theme. This seems to bring back most of the blogs.

We’re still working through the problems, but I’ll keep you up to date as much as possible.

Right now, subdomains aren’t working. I don’t believe that’s an issue for any of you, but if so, let me know.

If your WordPress blog isn’t working, FTP into your site, copy all your plugins to your computer, then delete them from the server. This should bring the blog back. Then, you can upload the plugins again and reactivate them. The only one we see a problem with is Live+Press. I’ve made note of this, and it will be looked into.

Gallery2 is still violating security rules in a number of places. Some times it works, some times it doesn’t. Please let me know if there’s anything wrong with your gallery. This will help us to track down the problem and fix it.

Some of these issues are extremely complex, and may take some time to fix. I will keep you up to date here on this blog.

We’ve just updated some of our security and found out that some of the applications (such as WordPress and Gallery2) can trip some of the security features. We’re fixing them as we find them, but if you’re working on your site and you get a “Internal Server Error”, make a note of the exact time, and what you were trying to do and let me know so we can fix it.

Thanks.