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.us 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.us.

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.

We have come across a few email issues over the last few days. This has come about due to new policies that some US Internet Service Providers, Comcast Internet and AT&T (including SBC), that have block all email coming from our servers. They have mistakenly branded our servers as spammers (we don't spam!)

The problem is that the way that we forward email to our customers email accounts, any spam that might get passed along with legitimate email that our customers get, will be seen as spam coming from our servers. In my opinion, this is the wrong way for these companies to behave (and I've detailed why I think so in this fairly technical article that I've posted on my personal blog) but they are giant conglomerates and we have to play by their rules.

We have taken actions to minimize the chance of a re-occurrence of this problem. We have implemented spam filtering of email before it is forwarded to your email accounts. Don't expect it to be 100% fool proof but that in combination with whatever spam filtering you already use, it may stop some additional spam from reaching you. The one big problem with any spam filtering like this is that it's possible that it might misidentify some legitimate email as spam and bounce it (send an error message) back to the sender. There is not a lot we can do to prevent that other than to suggest that the sender resend the message. It is more likely to work on the second attempt. Hopefully this won't happen too often.

I do think that in the long run, email will be replaced by newer technology. Unfortunately that new technology has not emerged yet. Until then, it will be a constant battle to keep the email systems running and for them to not be overrun by spam.

We've added a couple of new color schemes to each of the layouts. The new schemes are based on a navy blue and fern green color.

They are marked as "Experimental" as they may change slightly depending on feedback.

We've upgraded the content editor for editing descriptions and page content. There are a number of new features.

• You can create and edit tables, use superscript and subscript characters.
• There is an erase format button to clean up text.
• There are now three Paste buttons. One that is the typical paste that attempts to paste all text and formatting from the source, a second that will just paste the text and strip out any formatting and another that specially designed for importing Microsoft Word to help strip out the problem formatting but keep useful formatting.
• We have added a Block Quote that will indent on both the left and right side of the text.
• There is also text search and replace buttons to finding and changing text throughout a page.

On a slightly different topic, there is now a way to control the page width of some of the layouts. Check the Advanced page in the administration for details.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we will be making some changes to the infrastructure that runs ArtSites.us and all of our customers' websites. If all goes well, you will not notice any changes. Just in case there are some issues, I thought I would give you a brief overview of what's going on so that if you do see something odd you will know what's going on. Some of the following details may be hard to follow but I did want to get this out to everyone. We will be looking after everything so you won't have to do anything.

The most important point is that I'd like everyone to keep a closer eye on their website if the can. If something seems to be behaving differently that you think it should, send us feedback describing what is happening.

Over the next couple of days we will be moving each website to a new web server. The process involves copying the website to the new server and then making changes to the domain name so that it points at that new web server. There will be a period of time of no more than an hour where we will not actually know if a visitor might be coming to the old website or the new one. To make sure that you or your visitors don't make any changes or submissions to your old website, there will be a "maintenance" message on the old copy of your website anywhere where a change might be made. You website will still be readable but you won't be able to get into the administration system and your visitors won't be able to post guestbook entries of mailing list submissions. As I said, this limitation will be no longer than an hour and that hour will only be under some very unlikely circumstances. Most won't see this at all.

The website move is the first stage and should take a couple of days. The second stage will be the movement of email handling. That's likely to happen next week sometime but I will send out a warning before hand so you will have a better sense of when it will happen.

Also, during this time we will likely queue up any non-time-critical request until after the transfer process is complete.

Let us know if you you have any concerns or questions about this process.

We have added an additional text field for each image that will allow for additional text below images. This helps for images where there is a lot of text associated with the image but you want the image to be displayed closer to the top.