News

Over the coming weeks we expect to roll out many small features in ArtSites. Many of these you might not notice such as small improvments in the layout of the administration system. Others, such as one that will be rolled out today, are pretty significant.

Today we will roll out a completely rebuilt rich content editor. That's the editor that you find in various parts of the administration system that allows you insert images, select fonts, text colors, etc. The new version doesn't look all that different from the previous version. Some of the icons have been redesigned. One new feature is the "Embed Code" icon (looks like a filmstrip on the right side of the second line). This allows you to insert embed codes from other websites such as YouTube.com, Facebook, etc. It also deals with a problem that we have seen with Internet Explorer 9 causing the editor to fail in various ways.

If you see any problems with the editor please contact us.

We have improved the customization of various bits of text throughout the website. This is particularly useful if you want to create a website in a language other than English but it is also great if you want to tweak the wording on some of the pages.

We just finished fixing a problem with our Horizontal Scrolled layout. It was not showing the correct layout when viewed using some web browsers but this has now been corrected.

If you are interested in what went wrong, you have to know some of the details behind how that layout operates.

Horizontal Scrolled layout uses some newer, more complex technologies that only work reliably on newer versions of most web browsers. In this case, Internet Explorer version 6 or greater, Safari version 4 or greater, and Firefox version 1.5 or greater as well as a bunch of other, lesser known web browsers. Only about 1% of visitors to ArtSites websites use a web browser that does not fit this concept of a "modern web browser" so we are fairly safe in using these technologies for our administration system.

We know that there are some people out there still using computers that are 8 or more years old that might have web browsers that don't meet these requirements. To make sure that these people don't get left behind, we identify the web browser and if it doesn't meet our standard of "modern", we revert the view of the website back to the Tiled layout, but only for that visitor. So while the visitor won't see the website in exactly the way that the artist wanted them to see it, at least they can see it and likely wouldn't even know there was a problem.

The nature of this particular bug is that some modern web browsers that should have seen the new layout were being shown the old layout.

Over the last couple of months we have added a couple of new layouts for your ArtSites.ca websites.

The first layout is called "Horizontal Scrolled" and is a kind of a combination of the Vertical and Tiled layouts but with a horizontally scrolled thumbnail list for a gallery. In the gallery, it puts a scrollable list of your images across the bottom of the browser window.

On the opposite end of the complexity scale is the "Minimalistic" layout. This is a left aligned layout that removes a lot of decorations that most of the other layouts have and puts more focus on the art. The Minimalistic layout is still a work in progress so it may change slightly as we get feedback about it's look and operation.

Don't hesitate to let us know what you think of these two layouts or if you have ideas for new layouts.

We have been seeing many unsolicited offers of search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising that are being posted to artist's feedback pages or sent to their email address. This is SPAM and should be treated as such. Be very suspicious of such offers. While such offers might be legitimate, the use of spam to contact people it not the way to do legitimate business.

Over the next few days, we will be transferring many of our ArtSites client websites to a new server. If all goes well, your visitors should never know that this happened. Your website should not experience any downtime.

There maybe a small window of time of up to an hour where you will not be able to administration system. Please keep an eye out for any problems that might creep into the tools as a result of the transfer. Let us know if you see anything that seems odd to you.

I hope that your new year is starting out well.

We've been seeing increased spam being submitted to ArtSites artists websites as feedback and guestbook comments. These are sophisticated enough to get by our spam filtering. If you see comments that are odd or are asking for personal information please be careful before providing that information.

If you find any spam that you are concerned about, please contact us and we can make suggestions about what to do with it.

Over the past few days, we've had issues with getting email to Yahoo.com that originates or passes through our servers. If you are having your ArtSites email sent to a Yahoo.com email address, you might consider sending that email to another email address. Please contact us if this affects you. We are working on fixing this problem with Yahoo but they are extremely slow to react so it may take some time.

It seems that we've had one of our servers crash twice in the last 24 hours. There maybe something wrong with the hardware on that server so we will have to run it through some test. This will require making websites unavailable for a period of a couple of hours. We will schedule this for the middle of the night so it will have minimal impact and we will give everyone a day or so of warning before this is done.

We hope that everyone has been having a great summer! Rochelle and I are taking a bit of a vacation from Thursday August 21 through Sunday August 31. We will be able to continue support everyone as we always have although our responses may not be as quite timely as normal.