DD-
Thanks for the confirmation and suggestions.
I’m hosted on goDaddy and they claim that they don’t disable or hamper any of the php functions. That being said, I decided to look in the php configuration file that THEY created on account setup and could see that there was a line that had disabled the URL access for the fle_get_contents function.
A quick edit of the php configuration file changing “OFF” to “ON” and I’m in business! Thanks again for the help.