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Thursday, May 1 2008

New release - May 1st 2008

It's release time again and this one is a biggy! Lots of things we've been waiting to get out for for a very long time, with something for everyone. Get ready for some excitement, quiet in the back row please, here it comes...

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Thursday, April 17 2008

Successful Completion of Scheduled Downtime

Our scheduled down time was completed successfully at 11:20 AM BST (GMT+1) following 50 minutes of programmed maintenance work (downtime commenced at 10:30 AM BST). All systems are fully functional.

We thank you for your patience.

Friday, April 11 2008

Notification of Planned System Downtime

Time: Thursday, 17th April 2008 10 AM BST (GMT+1)

Duration: 1 hour

We will be performing an upgrade to our database layer. During this upgrade, sites will be unavailable for editing or viewing. Visitors will see a notice informing them the site is down for maintenance with the expected return time. Normal service should resume by 11 AM.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Wednesday, April 2 2008

Bug fixes and site updates - 2 April 2008

We were worried that if we released bug fixes yesterday, no one would believe us (being April Fool's day). So we held off a day, did some more testing and felt happier getting them out today. Some of you may think we play computer games for 3 weeks and then have a mad rush of development over the last week to get work completed. If only! We've actually been busy fixing some bugs, while work continues on some big ticket items.

Today we released these changes to correct some annoying bugs and added a useful guide for those interested in Search Engines:

Continue reading...

Friday, March 28 2008

Changes to the way HTML is generated

Hi, Dan here, SiteMaker's HTML developer guy. I've been working to make the HTML that we output a little more user and search engine friendly. As you may or may not know, we generate an HTML version of your site mainly for SEO reasons but also as an alternative for people who don't have Flash or are using a non-visual web browser. If you wanna know exactly what I've been up to, then read on...

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Wednesday, March 26 2008

New Release - 25 March 2008

Apparently, spring arrived last week, but with the Arctic weather that hit the UK over the weekend you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd returned to mid-winter. But this week does mark the arrival of our 2nd release for the year with some goodies and some bug fixes. We continue to finish and refine two larger projects - domain name registrations and a new File Manager - and these will be launched very soon. But rather than keep you waiting we wanted to give you a few new features to play with while we polish the other features and we wait for the real spring to arrive.

So what's on offer this month? You'll find details below:

New Features

  • 'Viewport' added to make editing and managing files easier
  • Improvements to W3C compliance and some tidy up
  • HTML version of page now opens in new window
  • Making Title tags more prominent in the HTML
  • 'Show Homes' page and links added to moonfruit.com
  • Addition of 10 new templates
  • New SEO guide added to the moonfruit.com portal
  • Improvements to multiple selection with changes to using the Control or Shift keys
  • Ctrl key required for 'logout' from widgets when editing

Bug fixes

  • Making the File Manager more context sensitive when adding images, audio and video
  • Resetting the Video widget will now hide the video provider label

Continue reading...

Wednesday, March 19 2008

New showhomes sites

Because our tool can be used in so many ways, the choices can often be mind-boggling. Each tool has a number of different ways that it can be customised to make it look the way you want and do the things you do, but sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it! So that's why we present to you the show homes. Here you'll find real examples of how tools can be used to stimulate your creative imagination...

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Friday, February 8 2008

New Release - 8 Feb 2008

It's the first release of the year! Hurray! And hopefully a good one too. We've got a few big changes to site navigation, some edit improvements and some bug fixes/enhancements. Details below.

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Friday, January 25 2008

Resolved: service outage: 08.10 GMT 25 Jan 2008

All services should be back to normal from 10.15 GMT. We will provide further information on the cause of the outage once or network provider makes it available to us. Apologies for this service disruption.


SiteMaker services are currently due to a network outage at our datacentre affecting not just SiteMaker. Our network providers engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We will provide updates as soon as we have them.

Friday, January 11 2008

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

New changes due out in Feb will make navigating around your site more intuitive and allow your customers to bookmark specific pages. For more details read on.

Continue reading...

Thursday, January 10 2008

What a year!

2007 was quite a big year for SiteMaker, as far as features, fixes and new widgets flying off the shelves were concerned. The highlights have been:

  • New features and widgets - Google site search, comments widget, mail to a friend, copy & paste, new forum, themeable technology across several widgets, multiple select, a lot more new media, new advanced (fully configurable) form
  • Improved features - More disk space, more templates, page permissions and ordering, enhanced tables, rebuilt chat widget, FAQ search, text formatting
  • SEO - Published HTML now W3C compliant, Google Webmaster tools (Verify), auto-generation of a sitemap file

Below you will find our 2007 release dates with a more detailed list of the main components for each of those releases:

Continue reading...

Wednesday, January 2 2008

Sitemaps and Google Verify

The wait is over. We took on board the number of requests for these two tools and decided you'd waited long enough. All users can now publish sitemaps, as well as Verify their websites.

For details on how to check for the sitemap and how to add Google Verify, read on...

Continue reading...

Thursday, December 20 2007

New Release - 20th Dec 2007

Ho ho ho. T'was the week before Christmas and all through the office not a developer was moving, not even those usually most active. Probably tired, but that's another story.

Anyway, it's Christmas present time! That's right, SiteMaker Claus has his goody bag stuffed full of little software updates for all the good boys and girls (and even those who haven't been so good). So here's the list in full...

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Thursday, December 13 2007

SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part VI - Return of the Taxi

If you thought we'd let Joe's Taxis gather dust in West London you were wrong. Far from being abandoned to the internet ether we've kept tabs on how the 'mythical' west London taxi business was doing six months down the line, after being set up by Joe. As far as rankings go, the two domain names are doing very nicely thank you.

For an update on how Joe's London Taxis and West London Taxis have changed in their rankings with the major search engines, read on.

Continue reading...

Tuesday, December 4 2007

Why am I (or my visitors) seeing a text only version of my site?

This problem is being encountered for users with Internet Explorer 6.

To enable the SiteMaker application and the web pages to load quicker we made changes to some code (JavaScript) which we released recently.

We use JavaScript to detect what version of Flash Player you have installed on your system amongst other things and we upgraded the JavaScript file and the loading process for this file to provide several improvements. Unfortunately, IE6 isn't exactly standards compliant so our mission to improve efficiency appears to have upset the IE6 web browser.

IE7, Firefox, Safari etc have no issues with these improvements.

Continue reading...

Monday, December 3 2007

My music is playing back too fast - it sounds like Chipmunks!

Do the MP3s on your site sounding like Chip and Dale (the chipmunks) are doing covers of your favourite songs? The reason is down to how you initially encoded your songs. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Files encoded using 'standard' MP3 format at CONSTANT bit rate will normally play without issue, provided the sample rate is a multiple of 44.1kHz - other 'interpolating' sample rates cause Flash Player to speed up the playback.

So, how do you fix this problem? You have two choices...

IMPORTANT Update 21 Dec 07: Especially if your page lengths remain constant throughout your site in IE7: Please just go to Adobe and download the latest Flash player and this should fix get the chipmunks out of your site and give you variable page lengths back. If you downloaded the beta version (in article below) you will find a fix with instructions in comment #2 beneath this post.

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Thursday, November 29 2007

Google Webmaster Tools - the lowdown

Firstly, sorry for going quiet on you in the forum with regards to some requests. The truth is we have been listening but we've been busy over the last few weeks discussing what we could offer, how it would be presented and when we would find time to develop it. So in answer to your many questions about Google Webmaster tools on Moonfruit, please read on...

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Friday, November 23 2007

Where's my email? The truth about forms

We often have customers ask us why emails that are sent from forms on their site take so long to arrive or why they just don't arrive at all? Slow or lost emails isn't a common event but the cause of this problem usually is. For more details read on...

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Thursday, November 22 2007

Missing Forum on moonfruit.com - back now

It's back now! Thanks. --- We are currently doing some work on the Moonfruit Forum so it will be out of action for a short while. This is unrelated to the scheduled maintenance we had earlier this morning. But worry not, we will have a forum back online very soon.

Essential Maintenance at 9:27 Thursday 22 Nov.

As already highlighted in our Message of the Day to all users (all site leaders will see this when logging in), our services have been taken down briefly for essential maintenance. This will be a brief period of downtime and should take no longer than 10-15 min.

The site is back up and running (9:45). If you continue to see a maintenance page then your browser will have stored a copy of that page and you will need to clear your cache (or Temporary Internet Files). Please use the Help in your web browser to find out how to clear your cache or temporary Internet files.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

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