Scar Media Group

05/07/2026

You'd be surprised how much ground gets covered in a single week. Here's what last week actually looked like.

🔧 Setting up a course payment flow with

🌐 Sorting DNS and email records in for a batch of sites rebuilt in Replit (which is a browser-based app builder)

🐛 Fixing a PHP issue on a server missing a required image-processing library

📚 Rebuilding a set of courses on a new website

Then the smaller things that quietly matter just as much...

🔑 Helping a client's customers who got locked out of a course with the wrong login

📇 Updating a logo and discovering the contact page had the wrong contact name and phone number on it

🐌 Installing speed fixes on a website that was loading so slowly, I made a cup of coffee while it loaded... 😉 (nah... but you get the picture)

📢 And the usual ads optimisation and content work in the background

Most problems don't arrive labelled 'this is a DNS issue' or 'this is a UX issue'... they just arrive.

Being able to move across all of it, without handing the client off to someone else is usually the actual value.

That's the part that's easy to miss... and the part I care about most.

01/07/2026

“When I actually walked through the journey as a website visitor, things weren't lining up right.”

Among the myriad of tasks, last week's highlight project was moving a set of courses from one website to another.

So moving the course content was easy, just exporting from one site and then importing it to the other site.

The issues soon came to light when I actually walked through the journey as a course taker would.

Things just weren't lining up.

Wrong emails, missing links to actually start the course, tax wasn't being charged... it was all disconnected.

It's a good reminder of how much goes into making an online course "just work" for the person buying it. 🧩

It's not just what the website looks like either... it's what happens before and after someone clicks "buy".

Whether the price displays properly, if the tax is handled the way it should be, do they land on the right page afterwards, does a confirmation email actually arrive with the right links in it, does it send an invoice automatically...? The list goes on.

And even little details like a "💡Note:" telling someone exactly what to do next, or making sure nothing breaks along the way.

That's the invisible work that turns a clunky journey into a seamless one. ✅

www.ScarMediaGroup.com

20/06/2026

So a website was flagging antivirus warnings. Another developer had already looked at it and couldn’t find the cause.

Here’s how I tracked it down.

The warning was coming from AVG antivirus flagging the site as suspicious, which in the first instance has probably cost this client a lot of money in lost sales because anyone using AVG antivirus or any other serious antivirus software would not see the website.

Ok, so nothing looked wrong scratching around on the surface.

core was clean, the uploads folder was fine, no malicious PHP files, no obvious injections.

A reasonable developer could look at this and walk away thinking “false positive.”

It was time to get right down into the weeds.

By using server-level terminal access, I scraped and analysed every external script loading on the homepage.

That’s when it got interesting.

A third-party chat widget called InteractionApp, which was probably added years ago and long forgotten, was still loading scripts sitewide. Except InteractionApp wasn’t serving a chat widget anymore…

It was serving casino promo content through the same script URL, which brought up a nice casino landing page that looked very suss.

Anyway, the site wasn’t hacked,
there was no malware,
the “bad actor” was a legit service the business had once trusted, that had since been repurposed for something else entirely… and nobody knew it was still there.

Removed the scripts, cleared Cloudflare cache, verified the fix server-side. Clean!

The lesson here isn’t really about antivirus warnings. It’s about this, and I see it often:

Businesses accumulate “digital debt.”

Old plugins, forgotten widgets, abandoned third-party services… that can sit quietly in the background and most of the time nobody checks, until something breaks, or flags, or gets exploited.

If your website’s been built on over the years by many developers or agencies, there’s a probability that something’s in there that shouldn’t be.

Not necessarily because anyone did anything wrong… just because sometimes that’s how websites evolve.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I look for.

09/06/2026

A day in the life of... ☕📊

Every morning I was opening a client's Google Ads manager, checking campaign spend, updating a spreadsheet and checking whether the account was tracking over budget.

It didn’t seem like a big deal until I realised I’d been doing the same thing over and over, and I have to keep on doing it. So I spent a couple of hours building an automation to do it. 🤖

Funny how the jobs that "only take a few minutes" are often the ones that can waste the most time. 😅

Here’s what happened... 👇

Small repetitive tasks can quietly drain hours from your week. Here’s how one daily Google Ads reporting task became a simple automation.

17/04/2026

A day in the life of… One of this week’s missions was chasing down ghosts from an old version of a website that refused to leave quietly.

Found them hiding in the background, cleaned them out, and restored order. 👻💻

No fires, no panic, just logical head down-bum up stuff, quietly wrestling old problems into submission. 🫯

Another normal week. 😄

Time for a glass of Sauv Blanc. Have a great weekend. 🥂