ArtSites Updates

I just wanted to let everyone know that we have changed the login system that is uses by ArtSites. In the past, you have been able to log in virtually permanently. Now a login session will expire due to inactivity. By default, that inactivity is 30 minutes but if you click on the "Stay logged in?" check box, it will be 2 weeks.

We made this change to make it less likely that someone would log into their account on another computer and leave it so that someone else might access their account. The were a number of small issues with specific web browser behaviours with the old system as well that the new system avoids.

If you find that the next time you need to log into the administration system, you have forgotten your user name or password, just click on the "reset the password" link on the login page to have the system send you an email that will include your username as well as a link to allow you to reset your password.

As promised, I have found time while on my cross country bicycle trip to work on some features for ArtSites. Today's addition is a small one but will help some people who want to add large, high resolution images to pages. Particularly posters for events, etc. Our Image Insertion Tool automatically reduces the size and resolution of images before inserting them. The size created is a reasonable balance of size (for fast page loading), security (making sure that people cannot download a high resolution version of the image) and image quality. This works for most people but there are some situations, especially where someone has created a large image with lots of fairly small text on it. Such images often look fuzzy and unreadable. There was a way to manually fix this and I've been doing that by hand when people requested this. Today's feature puts that in the hands of our artists to do themselves.

You will notice on the Image Browser page that you get when you "Pick and Image" from the Image Insertion Tool that there is a Normal and Original links just below the title of the image. If you choose Normal or just click on the image itself, you will get what you've always gotten, an image that has been resized to fix into a 450 by 450 pixel box. Now, if you click on the Original link, you get the image that your originally uploaded. This can be very large and will slow down the display of your website considerable if you use it so only use this feature when you need it.

As with all other features, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Hi Everyone,

Geoff and I want to share some very exciting news with you!

On Sunday, May 20, we are leaving for a 3-4 month trip across Canada and the Northern USA. Geoff is bicycling across the country! Yes, all the way to St. John's, Newfoundland - over 8,000 km from Vancouver, BC (for our US artists = 5,000 miles! ;-) This has been something Geoff has wanted to do his entire life and we decided there's no better time to do it than the present. I will be driving the support/chase VW camper van, affectionately called "VanGo". (The intentionally misspelled, "catchy" name is both aspirational (since the van is OLD, from 1984, and we're hoping it "goes" the entire trip) and a gentle nod to ArtSites - although I'm convinced we need to add more color and artwork to its exterior - any takers?! ;-)

If you're interested in following our progress, you can do so at either GeoffsTour.com or www.facebook.com/GeoffsTour. Geoff and I are very excited about our trip and also a bit anxious since we're not quite sure how this will all pan out. That said, VanGo is completely decked out with a bunch of technology tools and gadgets, which will allow both of us to conduct business-as-usual and respond to your requests while on the road. Given our uber-techie lifestyle, this was really an essential requirement ;-)

Over the summer, Geoff and I will be focused on further developing and updating ArtSites and we thought this trip would also be a great opportunity to meet up with YOU in-person! If you'd like to meet us too, even just for a quick coffee or tea, please drop us a line. (All phone numbers and contact information will remain the same.) We would also love to have your help in further spreading the word about ArtSites. You can do this in a number of different ways by:

• Continuing to recommend ArtSites to your artist friends
• Recommending Art Fairs we should hit along the way
• Letting us know about any opportunities for informal ArtSites "meetups", e.g. where we could do a demo or tutorial of our service for a group of artists or an Artist Guild/Association
• Sharing those "must-see" attractions we should hit along our route ;-)
• Sending us lots of positive "vibes" for the trip! ;-)

Geoff and I want to sincerely thank you for your continued ArtSites support! Without you, ArtSites would not be where it is today and we simply want to let you know how thrilled we are to have you as part of the growing ArtSites family! Once again, please feel free to follow our TransContinental progress online and find out when we're in a city or town near you! :-)

Now, back to our LONG to-do list of last-minute errands! ;-)

Cheers,

Rochelle and Geoff

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.us 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.