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February 11, 2014 – Our area is under a Winter Storm Warning and we have decided to delay opening until 9:30am for the safety of our staff.  Right now, much of the area is just wet, but according to the weather service, the freezing line is moving south and there is potential for hazardous travel conditions.  We will continue to evaluate the situation, but it looks like we will be able to open after this short delay.  We will continue to post updates here as there may be issues later today and tomorrow.

Our technicians will be responding to call and emails.  If you need to contact us, please call 256-547-6817 or email us at support@internetpro.net.

January 30, 2014 – 6:25am – It looks like Comcast is having an area wide outage that is affecting internet, TV, and their phone service.  We do not yet know the extent of the outage but we are working to find out more information. We will be posting further updates here as we get them.

Update 7:25am – They are aware of the problem and have a preliminary estimated time to repair set at 10:30am.  However, this time was just set by their automated system and means that no technicians have actually evaluated the issue just yet, so it is most likely not a good estimate.

Update 7:50am – The Comcast system seems to be back online across the area.

January 28, 2014 – Due to inclement weather conditions and for the safety of our staff, we have elected to close our office. Our phones will still be monitored by our technicians. However, our main office location will be closed for dropoffs, pickups, and other business. We expect to be able to reopen tomorrow (Wednesday) at our normal time of 8:00am. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update – 2:45pm – We are no longer sure we are going to be able to open at 8:00am tomorrow. Conditions continue to deteriorate. We will post updates as we have them.

Update – 4:45pm – January 28, 2014 – We have made the decision to postpone opening of our office until at least 10:00am. We will be reevaluating road conditions in the morning and will post another announcement around 8:00am.

Update – January 29, 2014 –  The roads in our county are still deemed “impassible” by the Emergency Management Agency.   It does not look like that will change by 10:00, so our office will be closed for today.  However, our technicians will still be available by phone for support.  We do understand that many of our customers are not affected by this weather, so we will do our best to handle your technical issues via phone.  Unfortunately, for the safety of our staff, we will not be able to dispatch technicians onsite today.   We will be evaluating the situation later today and/or tomorrow morning.  We will continue to post updates here.

Update – January 29, 2014 5:15pm – We are planning on opening our main office at 10:00am tomorrow (Thursday).   We will have staff manning the phones at 8:00am.  If conditions are still bad, we may end up not opening the main office until later, but we will post updates here.  There will be some customers who are scheduled for service calls who we will not be able to reach.  We will be rescheduling those calls.

Update – January 30, 2014 6:30am – The Comcast outage is affecting our phone system and the ability of our technicians to field phone calls from home.  We are working to find a solution to the problem but in the mean time, our phones will be unmanned and calls we will be checking our voicemail system to return calls as quickly as possible.  While our phone system is out, we also recommend emailing us at support@internetpro.net.

Update – January 30, 2014 7:50am – Comcast is back online and our phone system is back to normal.  We will have a skeleton crew in our main office by 10:00am.  Our scheduling is still going to be a little behind as we work with a reduced staff and try to handle emergencies first.  However, if you need to come by the office, we will be there.

We’ve updated our managed WordPress sites to a new version (3.8).

Here is the press release regarding the new version:

WordPress has gotten a facelift. 3.8 brings a fresh new look to the entire admin dashboard. Gone are overbearing gradients and dozens of shades of grey — bring on a bigger, bolder, more colorful design!

Modern aesthetic

The new WordPress dashboard has a fresh, uncluttered design that embraces clarity and simplicity.

Clean typography

The Open Sans typeface provides simple, friendly text that is optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing. It’s even open source, just like WordPress.

Refined contrast

We think beautiful design should never sacrifice legibility. With superior contrast and large, comfortable type, the new design is easy to read and a pleasure to navigate.

WordPress on every device

We all access the internet in different ways. Smartphone, tablet, notebook, desktop — no matter what you use, WordPress will adapt and you’ll feel right at home.

High definition at high speed

WordPress is sharper than ever with new vector-based icons that scale to your screen. By ditching pixels, pages load significantly faster, too.

Admin color schemes to match your personality

WordPress just got a colorful new update. We’ve included eight new admin color schemes so you can pick the one that suits you best.

Color schemes can be previewed and changed from your Profile page.

Refined theme management

The new themes screen lets you survey your themes at a glance. Or want more information? Click to discover more. Then sit back and use your keyboard’s navigation arrows to flip through every theme you’ve got.

Smoother widget experience

Drag-drag-drag. Scroll-scroll-scroll. Widget management can be complicated. With the new design, we’ve worked to streamline the widgets screen.

Have a large monitor? Multiple widget areas stack side-by-side to use the available space. Using a tablet? Just tap a widget to add it.

Twenty Fourteen, a sleek new magazine theme

Turn your blog into a magazine

Create a beautiful magazine-style site with WordPress and Twenty Fourteen. Choose a grid or a slider to display featured content on your homepage. Customize your site with three widget areas or change your layout with two page templates.

With a striking design that does not compromise our trademark simplicity, Twenty Fourteen is our most intrepid default theme yet.

We wanted to help make people aware of this very dangerous virus.   It destroys your documents and will affect not just the infected computer, but also mapped network drives as well.  We have seen a few of our customers get infected with this and have had to restore from backup each time.  There is no way to recover the files encrypted by this virus.   Below is a document published by US-CERT, the United States Computer Readiness Team.  It outlines how this virus is distributed, what it does, and how to prevent infection.

National Cyber Awareness System:

We’ve done a major update to our iFoye remote access tool.  Version 4.6 utilized Java so that we could support cross platform (Windows, Linux, AND Mac).  However, due to some recent security issues with Java, some people were reluctant to have it on their computer.  To better support those people and to speed up the process when getting connected to a technician, our new iFoye version utilizes stand-alone client downloads.  There are two available downloads: 1) A small, online version which just gets the components the software needs to run and 2) a larger, offline version, which downloads everything our software needs to run on your computer.   We also still have the Java plugin version available which runs just like the older 4.6 version.

The new version of iFoye also offers many enhancements and fixes including better Windows 8  support.  Honestly, most of the changes are on the technican side, so you as the customer receiving help won’t see much change, but these changes will help us help you faster and more efficiently than ever!   We look forward to working with you using this new tool, so if you have computer issues, don’t hesitate to call us at 256-547-6817!

A new version of WordPress was just released (version 3.7).   We are in the process of pushing out the updates to all of our managed WordPress sites.  If you have a WordPress site, we recommend checking the functionality to insure the update has not broken anything.   Below are the main changes to this version:

• Updates while you sleep: With WordPress 3.7, you don’t have to lift a finger to apply maintenance and security updates. Most sites are now able to automatically apply these updates in the background. The update process also has been made even more reliable and secure, with dozens of new checks and safeguards.
• Stronger password recommendations: Your password is your site’s first line of defense. It’s best to create passwords that are complex, long, and unique. To that end, our password meter has been updated in WordPress 3.7 to recognize common mistakes that can weaken your password: dates, names, keyboard patterns (123456789), and even pop culture references.
• Better global support: Localized versions of WordPress will receive faster and more complete translations. WordPress 3.7 adds support for automatically installing the right language files and keeping them up to date, a boon for the many millions who use WordPress in a language other than English.

Of course, the “updates while you sleep” have been getting handled by Network Solutions, Inc. on our managed sites, but now the software is doing it for us.  We will still be applying updates to plugins and themes and, of course, pushing out the major WordPress updates which will not be automatic.
Update – Octover 30, 2013 – WordPress 3.7.1 was just released as a maintenance release fixing some bugs with the 3.7 rollout.  Here are the main updates:

• Images with captions no longer appear broken in the visual editor.
• Avoid fatal errors with certain plugins that were incorrectly calling some WordPress functions too early.
• Fix hierarchical sorting in get_pages(), exclusions in wp_list_categories(), and in_category() when called with empty values.
• Fix a warning that may occur in certain setups while performing a search, and a few other notices.