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.

ArtSites.ca has added a new page for Events. Many people where trying to use the News page as an events page but that is specifically designed to display news. The News page is historical in nature while events tend to be in the future.

The events page will display your events in chronological order so that the next upcoming events will show near the top and events that are further in the future will be lower down the page. Events will expire automatically at a designated time. For all existing websites, the Events page is disabled so that you don't have to do anything right now. Your website won't change until you want to start adding events.

There are a couple of smaller changes that were included in this update. In the "Page Control" section of many pages, the renaming of the "Menu Name" was not updated on the title of the specific page. That has been fixed.

We have also added the ability to suppress the Next/Previous icons and links or just the icons on the feature image page. You can control that feature on the Advanced administration page in the Images section in the "Suppress Next/Previous Links:" and "Suppress Next/Previous Links Icons:" fields.

Let us know if you have any comments on these changes.

We have added a couple of new features to ArtSites.ca.

ImageBorders

Some of the layouts have had image borders for quite some time but we have made this feature more consistent in all layouts. By default the Vertical layout has a fairly wide border around the feature images (full sized image) and the other layouts have no borders around any images. To adjust or add these borders, go to the Advanced page in the administration of your website and look in the Images section. There are two fields, Feature Image Border Width: and Thumbnail Image Border Width:. If you set them to 1px (1 pixel) you will get the thinnest border possible around either the feature image or thumbnail images, respectively. A value of about 5px will give you a fairly wide border. I would suggest that you don't go above 1px for the thumbnail images.

Customize Your SlideShow

If you use the slideshow feature, you might be interested in selecting the images that show up in that show instead of the default that uses all the images associated with all the galleries. We use a special gallery to allow you to select the images that show up in a slide show. If you create a gallery with the name "SlideShowList", that gallery will not show up in your menu but the images placed in it will be the images that the slideshow chooses to display. If you don't have a "SlideShowList" gallery the slideshow will display all of your gallery images as it has done previously.

Hidden Galleries

This is a bit of an odd feature that a few people have asked for. People have asked for a gallery that does not show up in the menu but that allows for a direct web link. To provide this, we have another special purpose gallery name "HiddenGallery". If you have created a gallery with this name, it will not show up in the menu but if you type in the web address http://yourdomain.com/gallery/hiddengallery (change "youdomain.com" to your websites's domain name) you can see that gallery. Use this feature if you want to allow only certain people see some of your work. Keep in mind that this is not true privacy. It's quite possible that search engines might find the page. Also, anyone who understand this ArtSites feature can check to see if you have a HiddenGallery. So don't put anything in this gallery that you wouldn't want the world to see.

Let us know if you have any question or need help with these new features.