Moonfruit Lounge

RESOLVED: Service Outage 10:39 GMT 26 Feb 2010

2010-02-26T10:38:00+00:00

DETAIL: A routine disk resize has hung and we need to restart the filers

RESPONSE: We are currently rebooting the necessary servers. Service should be restored shortly

UPDATE 10:48: Service has been restored. Sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE 10:52: Another reboot has been required.

UPDATE 11:00: Service has been restored.

RESOLVED: Service Outage 20:57 GMT 05 Jan 2010

2010-01-05T21:44:00+00:00

DETAIL: Our database server has required an emergency restart

RESPONSE: We are currently restarting all dependent services

UPDATED 21:47 GMT: Services have been returned

UPDATED 10:17 GMT 06 Jan 2010: Our apologies for this very unexpected outage. All website data is safe and all services were returned to normal in 50 minutes.

We were due to upgrade the software licences on our database layer which should have happened automatically. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication with our database vendor that caused our database layer to shut down. After emergency discussion with our vendor the issue was resolved.

This is a unique event and will not happen again. We can only apologise for the inconvenience caused by this downtime.

Accessing Email from the Web

2010-01-02T13:58:00+00:00

If you ever have problems accessing your email through the Moonfruit portal i.e. moonfruit.com (via the Domains tab) or you seem to be getting errors in you mail client e.g. Outlook or Mail then the quickest way to access your mail is via Webmail.

Simply access your account using:

http://webmail.mysitename.com

So simply add 'webmail.' to the front of your domain name without the www. This will bring up your webmail login page. Add your mailbox name (not an alias as this won't work), i.e. your full email address in the top fields and your email password in the field below e.g. mailbox@mysitename.com

The same applies to all other domains where a mailbox has been set up, and don't forget to use the mail box name not an alias.

The other good thing you can do with webmail is that you can bookmark this webmail address to your Favorites in the browser.

Hope you find this useful.

Walt

Adding social media to the mix. Should you? Could you? Would you?

2009-12-14T15:45:00+00:00

We've met so many interesting people during the Moonfruit journey we thought why not get them to share their experiences and expertise with the wider Moonfruit community! So we've started a new blog series, 'Moonfruit Invites'. If you'd like to write a guest post which you think would interest the Moonfruit community do get in touch!

This guest post has been written by Business Link Entrepreneur of the Year and marketing expert Gemma Went who also has a Moonfruit website!

It’s been hard to avoid the subject of social media recently. The business, marketing and mainstream press has been full of both positive and negative opinion. It’s even graced the pages of Heat thanks to celebrity Tweeters. But is social media a viable option for business? In my humble opinion, yes. Definitely.

Before I go into the whys and wherefores of that statement, I should introduce myself. I’ve been a marketing and pr professional for the last 10 years, earning my stripes primarily within the creative industry. I set up Red Cube Marketing this time last year to offer marketing and pr consultancy to businesses and soon added social media to that offering after immersing myself in it and becoming 100% hooked on its power soon after. I am also a Moonfruit user, yes the Red Cube site was done in my favourite sitemaker system (and no they’re not paying me to say that!).

So why do I believe social media is worthy of your time and effort? Well, there has been a huge change in behaviour recently. We, the people, have more control over what we read, watch and digest and can choose to connect wherever and whenever we like, either on the move, at home or at the office. Because of this increased connectivity, business and personal lives are much more interlinked and we can tailor how we do things to best suit our needs. We are much less trusting of the old ways of marketing, such as advertising and pr, choosing instead to trust the recommendations of others. Basically, we have more power and social media has been one of the things that has helped us to get it.

So what is it?

Social media, social networking, web 2.0, social media marketing, social business ... whatever you want to call it ... is about people connecting, engaging, having conversations and collaborating online. It’s a fundamental shift from traditional marketing methods of talking ‘at’ your audience, to talking ‘with’ them. The old broadcast method just doesn’t work anymore and this new way of communicating allows you to engage with your audience and, more importantly, allows them to engage with you, something that was rarely possible with the old way of doing things. This type of engagement leads to increased participation and creates community which, in turn creates brand advocates and word of mouth. As mentioned earlier, these word of mouth recommendations are what people now choose to base their decisions on and as businesses, we need to make sure we’re the ones being recommended. This includes all types of business: business to consumer or business to business, large corporates or SMEs.

How can it help your business?

There are a number of ways social media can help:

1. Grow your communities and connect. Never underestimate the power of community, as well as becoming brand advocates they are a useful source of rich information. Listen to them, learn from what they’re saying. You’d be surprised just how much insight you can benefit from.

2. Raise brand awareness and establish credibility. By showing you know what you’re talking about, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your field. Social media can also connect you to key influencers (such as industry leaders, journalists, peers) who can also hep to build reputation.

3. Monitor and manage reputation. There are a number of tools that allow you to track your brand and uncover what people are saying about you online. In the past, these conversations were going on whether you were aware of them or not, but with these new tools you have the ability to find and engage with them by thanking those that speak about you positively and responding to negative comments proactively. These monitoring tools can also be used to uncover what’s being said about your competitors, your clients/customers, potential clients/customers and any conversation around key industry topics.

4. Strengthen PR activity. These days any effective PR strategy should integrate both offline and online activity. Social media helps by boosting the spread of news further and increasing your reach dramatically across the various social media platforms.

5. Customer service tool. Twitter has shown itself to be a great real time customer service tool with brands such as Dell and BT introducing specific customer service profiles that people can connect with and have their support issues dealt with much quicker than the typical telephone model.

6. Improve website or blog search engine optimisation. As you may know, one key factor to a high ranking on Google and the like is the number of links from other websites to yours. By spreading news with links to your site across social media (which can then be repeated through things like retweets on Twitter) you can greatly increase the number of links to your site. This is boosted further if you include keywords in your social media strategy.

7. New business generation. By establishing credibility in your specialist area you can become the ‘go to’ person when people in your community seek your service or product. But, and I can’t stress this enough, never overtly sell! Social media isn’t a place for selling. It’s a place for connecting and engaging.

What next?

Before you dive headlong into it you need to be ready:

Be prepared to listen.
Accept you can’t control the conversation.
Understand that social media is more than just a marketing or pr tool. Its a new way of communicating.
Once you open the doors to it, you can’t close them. Commit to the long term.
Be prepared for the positive and negative.
Ensure you have the internal resources to support it and internal buy-in.

Getting Started

First and foremost, you need a strategy. Be clear about the objectives. What do you want social media to achieve for your business? Once you understand that think about how you will measure it. Return on investment is a big topic in social media with some saying it’s impossible to measure a conversation and others suggesting it can be measured in the same way as other marketing and pr activities. Consider how you already measure these (because you’re doing that of course aren’t you?) and integrate social media measurement with this. Of course with any type of measurement, it’s difficult to pinpoint exact sources of revenue if you have a few activities running, but looking at things like increased traffic, increase in mentions across the web etc will help you to understand the effect social media is having. By ensuring you measure revenue before the social media program starts and then during, you will get an idea if revenue is affected by these increases in traffic, mentions etc.

Find where your audiences are and be there. This might not necessarily mean the most popular platforms as there are niche networking sites that could also be useful. Decide who should be responsible internally, but don’t automatically give it to the intern. This is a role with a certain amount of responsibility, so pick someone that understands your business, has your values running through their veins, someone who is passionate about what you do and who is naturally sociable (that’s half the battle). There could be someone in the company that already ‘gets’ social media and is using it personally. Once you pick the right person, ensure they understand the strategy you’ve developed and what’s expected of them. Develop guidelines so they are clear what messages are acceptable and ensure they are equipped to deal with any negative comments. However, don’t forget you can’t control the conversation so these are purely guidelines, not a script. Social media can be addictive so be clear how much time is acceptable. If it’s an hour a day, make that known.

Once you’ve got that little lot done, don’t dive in. Start by finding who you want to connect with and listen. This is a core skill when it comes to social media, so listen to what people are talking about and how they are engaging. Ease yourself gently into conversations and be authentic and transparent. People want to connect with people, so let both the brand personality and the person shine through. It takes time to build a community so be prepared for it to take a while to establish relationships. Social media really is a marathon, not a sprint so don’t expect any quick fixes.

Finally, when thinking about your content try to get a good mix of your own thoughts, opinion and news mixed with those of others. Feel free to share useful content you’ve found on the web, think about what your audience will be genuinely interested in and give them that. Also make sure there’s a good mixture of sharing/retweeting and responding to others. Remember, it’s a conversation.

Hopefully that has given you some food for social media thought, but if you have any other questions, get in touch. I’m very sociable.

Gemma
Redcubemarketing.com

twitter.com/gemmawent
linkedin.com/in/gemmawent
facebook.com/gemmawent

Cool shops on Moonfruit using the HTML widget

2009-12-08T13:37:00+00:00

Well, we told you the HTML widget would open up new possibilities for e-commerce. And it looks like a few of our cutting edge users have started to integrate full-blown Amazon stores into their Moonfruit websites. Clever them ;-)

Of course this won't stop us working on our own e-commerce upgrade which is due out mid next year, but it certainly gives you something to get on with.

The Strictly Swimming home page with large shop link

So how have they done this?

The secret lies in the HTML Snippet widget and the Amazon widgets, specifically the aStore.

You can find the HTML Snippet widget in the File Manager, or on the New Toolbar, by using: 'Insert' menu -> 'Smart widgets' (side bar) there is a specific HTML widget for the 'Amazon Widgets'. Once you've added an HTML snippet to your page, the 'Setup' tab on the Editor provides a place to paste in your HTML code and in some cases a link to where to get the code from. Remember these will only work correctly for visitors with FlashPlayer 10 (about 90% market penetration and rising), so some users will not see them correctly, but that number will fall over the coming months.

So how does this look for Strictly Swimming? Well, by inserting the Amazon aStore, they can produce a full product display page as below.

Strictly Swimming product list

And finally you can see the individual product display page, which includes all the cool things from Amazon like user ratings.

Strictly Swimming product page

Check out the full site at www.strictly-swimming.com

And just to show you that there are others doing this too, check out the same from this cool website by The Food Bible.

The Food Bible homepage

The Food Bible shop page

The Food Bible product page

Check it out at www.thefoodbible.net.

New Toolbar updates as requested by you ;-)

2009-11-30T11:54:00+00:00

Following the article we published a few weeks back informing everyone that the New Toolbar would become the only Toolbar available from 1 Feb 2010. We got a lot of very good feedback from you along with suggestion about some tweaks that we could provide to make it even better. So we did them.

This was mainly around being able to hide/minimise different parts of the New Toolbar interface (e.g. sidebar/top icons) so that you had more room to play with while editing your site. So we've added the ability to do both of those things, which means you can now choose exactly how you want to set up the New Toolbar to so it can be viewed just the way you want it to.

So, just a quick reminder, this is what the New Toolbar looks like.

New Toolbar (side bar open)

The major piece of feedback we had was the request to be able to hide the Sidebar during edit mode so that when it was closed you could use the full screen real estate for your work and get a better idea of what the site was looking like. So now you can do this, either by clicking the 'strip' that runs down the side of the Sidebar on the outer edge, or by clicking again on the selected icon in the Top bar, e.g. icons now act like toggles for the Sidebar. So the hidden view will be like this.

New Toolbar (side bar closed)

And finally, if you want to maximise the vertical height of the edit environment, then you can choose to hide the top icons. To do this go to 'Edit', then 'Preferences' and finally 'Hide toolbar icons'. This will then remove the icons from view and leave the environment looking like this.

New Toolbar (side bar closed and icons hidden)

So there you have it. You ask, we do. Hopefully this will give many of you the feeling of the Advanced Toolbar that you have been pining for.

But as a reminder, the old Basic and Advanced Toolbars will no longer be available from 1 Feb 2010. This is being done to simplify our code base and allow us to develop more advanced features using the new technology available in newer versions of Flash (and Flex). It will help us develop a greater range of features more quickly, which we hope you will enjoy. We're not just doing it to wind you up. Honest ;-).

The original article explains more. We will also continue to work on new features for the Toolbar, so please let us know if you have further comments.

RESOLVED: Service Outage 14:31 GMT 27 Nov 2009

2009-11-27T14:35:00+00:00

DETAIL: We are currently experiencing a problem accessing our filers

RESPONSE: We will need to reset the service, this should not take much time

UPDATED 14:47: The restart was successful.

3 Jobs @ Moonfruit - Flash/Flex + Javascript/HTML + Sys Admin

2009-11-25T15:49:00+00:00

Hurray, jobs at moonfruit!! We're running to keep pace with you wonderful customers, so we're keen to boost the size of team moonfruit to help us kick off 2010 with a super new power team. Are you a Flex superhero? Can you write Javascript while tied up upside-down? Can you keep servers running during an alien attack? If the answer to any of these is yes, you could be kind of person we're looking for.

We're moving into a cool new office in Jan. It's spacious, floor to ceiling windows nr Oxford Circus and Soho. We need folks to fill the space (and up our DJ Hero scores)!

And if you know anyone for whom any of the answers to these might be yes, tell them too. We're known to reward people from time to time with shiny new mac products...

Full details below.

Flex/Flash Developer – OO, Actionscript, FlexUnit, Scrum

You must have an understanding of Object Oriented programming, 3 or more years as a Flex/Actionscript developer, with a degree/or equivalent in computer science. Additional experience of Flash, Actionscript, Actionscript 2, SVN, FlexUnit/ASUnit and Flex in all its different incarnations (including Flex 4 beta) would be helpful.

Front end developer - (X)HTML/CSS/JavaScript/UI

Essential skills in HTML, CSS, W3C web standards, JavaScript, Ajax, Browser bugs/inconsistencies, UI/Design skills. JQuery or similar and Macromedia Flash/Flex coding would be beneficial. Again 3 or more years experience as well as a degree/or equivalent in computer science.

Sys admin - Linux (RedHat/CentOs preferred)/Apache
Experienced sys admin with running Linux based servers. Additional DBA experience (Sybase/MSSQL)/Perl an advantage – 3 years+ experience

All roles will

Work in a mixed skill development team, using Scrum to release new product features every 4-6 weeks under the direction of the CTO. You will be comfortable using different technologies/languages as necessary to meet overall team objectives, though remain an expert in your area of experience. You will have the opportunity to lead development cycles, provide creative solutions to challenging problems, and help shape the direction of the Moonfruit Website building application.

CVs to jobs (at) moonfruit.com!

New Toolbar for everyone from Feb 2010

2009-11-25T09:10:00+00:00

Following the successful roll out of the New Toolbar for all new customers late in October, and the positive feedback from customers using it, we are now planning to phase out the old 'basic' and 'advanced' Toolbars from 1st Feb 2010.

We wanted to give you long enough to play with the New Toolbar (if you haven't already) as well as provide further feedback to us about what could make it better for you before this switch-over date. We have already received valuable feedback during the beta phase from you that helped us shape changes for the current release. We want to make sure we give further opportunity before the final version becomes the only version.

New Moonfruit Toolbar

So why are we doing this? Read on, read on...

Why we're doing it
The major drive for developing the New Toolbar was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this was an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today.

The New Toolbar will see the introduction of new blogging tools and the long awaited e-commerce upgrade, both of which we are aiming to deliver in the first half of next year.

The Old Toolbars (both basic and advanced versions) do not have the space or capabilities for us to integrate these new features as they are based on older version of Flash. To support both versions (Old and New) also creates overheads in the code that makes it difficult to add new features without breaking the old, and require editors to download parts of the old infrastructure that they will not use.

So for these reasons we have decided to phase out the Old Toolbars and create a single expandable New Toolbar that can cope with new additions for years to come. This has not been an easy decision, and we hope you understand that this creates a better platform for delivering new features in the future.

If you have comments or feedback on the New Toolbar, please let us know on this blog or via a support ticket.

New Toolbar highlights
You can get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)
Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)
HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Here's the original beta release article if you missed it.

Let us know if you have any thoughts or comments. We're still making some improvements to the New Toolbar before 1st Feb 2010, so let us know if there's something that really doesn't work for you.

RESOLVED: Service Outage 24 November 22:09 GMT

2009-11-24T22:14:00+00:00

DETAIL: We are currently experiencing another a problem with our internet connectivity.

RESPONSE: We are working with our provider to restore services as soon as possible.

UPDATED 22:24: Our network provider has confirmed the problem and are working to restore service.

UPDATED 22:52: Services appear to have been restored.

UPDATED 11:03 30 Nov: Incident report from Telstra Added

FOLLOW UP: We have received the following incident report from our upstream provider:-

UPDATE TO TELSTRA INCIDENT REPORT FOR OUTAGES ON 23 AND 24 NOV 2009

Having identified the root cause of the previous day’s incident engineers planned an activity to configure the x.x.0.0/16 summary route on to the appropriate Juniper core routers to allow a future decommissioning of the legacy routers. The configuration of this summary route on the Juniper core routers resulted in Internet services for certain customers being affected again.

The engineers were unable to quickly isolate the cause of this issue and so reversed the change in order to restore service. However once the change had been reversed service was not restored for all customers as it should have been. The engineers identified a spurious route being received from the legacy routers which appeared to be causing the problem. The engineers reset the BGP sessions to the legacy routes which removed the spurious route and restored service to affected customers.

The engineers later identified a Juniper OS bug that had caused the reversal to be unsuccessful. Telstra has already been testing a later version of the Juniper OS in their labs which is intended for network wide deployment. Juniper has confirmed that this specific bug is resolved in the release in test but Telstra will also include this bug in their test planning prior to deployment in production networks.

REMEDIAL ACTION

An urgent cross-functional review of the current MPLAN process has been scheduled (including a detailed analysis of our planning and handling of this incident).
All MPLAN’s now have an extended Director level approval policy whilst we review the current planned works process.
All MPlans will be checked after completion to ensure that the works have been carried out in accordance with the plan.

Telstra would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologise for the disruption and inconvenience that these incidents have caused. Please be assured that the immediate actions stated above have been given the highest priorities within Telstra to be implemented as quickly as possible. This is in order to avoid further incidents and to provide the highest levels of service to our customers.

RESOLVED: Service Outage 23 November 13:02 GMT

2009-11-23T13:10:00+00:00

DETAIL: We currently experience a problem with our internet connectivity.

RESPONSE: We are working with our provider to restore services as soon as possible.

UPDATE: Full service was restored at 13:25 GMT. We are now in contact with our provider to find out the cause of the outage.

#flymeto Creative website competition Winner and Top 10

2009-11-06T17:47:00+00:00

Oooo this was a toughy. There was a flurry of entries on Friday from people who've clearly spent some time working on their #flymeto websites for the chance to win the last set of tickets to their dream destination. It's been a pretty tough decision going through them all and working out who the winner is. In fact too tough. So we've decided to give prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places...

Winner!! - 1st prize of a $3500 holiday to Tokyo Japan from the UK!!
@SimonCwaller: Hi chaps, here is my entry for the #flymeto competition. I hope you enjoy it!

http://flymetotokyo.moonfruit.com

1st runner up - 2nd prize that we made up because it was too hard to pick. These guys will get $2000 towards their trip, which will hopefully nearly get them there ;-)
@netscribe http://twitpic.com/ohp0v - @moontweet #flymeto where the cherry blossoms bloom.

http://tokyobound.moonfruit.com

2nd runner up - winner of a shiny new ipod touch
@tom_hayward: @moontweet #flymeto my updated NYC Site for the contest :) thanks

http://newyorkfeeling.moonfruit.com

3. http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com
@sweet_teets: @moontweet Here is my website design for the game of skill: http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com #flymeto

4. http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com
@Timiwriter: @moontweet #flymeto Japan check out my website while I was eating #moonfruit http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com/

5. http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com
@ auntiedragon Despite the lovely snow it's still dark and depressing. I wonder if @moontweet would make this come true: http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com/

6. http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com
@philimobi: @moontweet #flymeto Thailand, one country, million reasons to visit, check my site http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com

7. http://pooh.moonfruit.com/
@49Chen @moontweet. Please #flymeto Sydney, even though I've written a website about New York. http://pooh.moonfruit.com

8. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com/
@jenngw: @moontweet My love letter to the place I'd like you to #flymeto: London. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com I had a blast making the site! Thanks!

9. http://londoncalling.moonfruit.com/
@jonathanwthomas: @moontweet Right-o, here's the awesome website I created for the contest: http://bit.ly/1QOX24 - can you confirm my entry? #flymeto

10. http://dreambig2california.moonfruit.com
@SparkleFreak here's the final product of my site:) #flymeto Hollywood, CALI http://bit.ly/3C8gp0

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this competition over the past week. We've loved your responses, humour and creativity. If we could we'd #flyyouall to see us ;-)

Moonfruit goes global - your site served from 14 locations around the world

2009-11-02T10:57:00+00:00

Moonfruit.com and every site hosted by us are now served from 14 locations around the world.

To celebrate the launch of this new service we are offering five (5) pairs of return tickets from wherever you are in the world to any of the 14 locations that Moonfruit sites are now served from. And we'll offset the carbon footprint of your flight so you can still look all your green friends in the eyes - or will that be green eyed friends ;-) - with a clear conscience.

To find out more read on...

What does this mean for you?

Moonfruit (and every site we host) is now running on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which means your sites and all their contents are now being served from a distributed network of servers located in 14 different places around the world. Using clever routing and caching, visitors to your site get the content served up to their computer from the closest location to them, which means they get your sites faster!

What do I have to do to get on this?

Most of you will already be on the CDN following changes in our domain name configurations that have been taking place over the last couple of weeks, but for some of you, who have your domain name hosted or managed elsewhere, you will need to take some action. So here are the different cases:

You have a site with one of our subdomain e.g. site.moonfruit.com (also t83.net, kk5.org, sm4.biz) - do nothing, you're already running on the CDN
You have a domain name which you bought from moonfruit.com, e.g. www.yourdomain.com - in most cases do nothing, you're already running on the CDN for the 'www' part of your domain, e.g. if you use www.yourdomain.com you're on the CDN, if you use yourdomain.com (without the www) you're not. This is because you can't set CNAME records on the root of your domain. So to get on the CDN you need to use the www version of your domain. (Instructions on how to do this will be provided.
You have a domain name hosted or managed by someone else (e.g. another domain name provider, not us) - in this case you'll need to change your DNS Zone file and create a CNAME record on the www part and set that CNAME to use your canonical address which is the original subdomain you got when you started your site, e.g. probably something.moonfruit.com. This doesn't mean that address will be displayed, it just means your domain name will copy the settings from this. Your domain provider will be able to help you with this (or you can always transfer it to us ;-) ).

Why did we do this?

More and more of our customers are located outside of the UK and have a global audience. This was really brought to a head following our last Twitter campaign in July which received an enormous amount of international attention. So that got us thinking, how could we improve the global delivery of our awesome website builder and improve the quality of service for everyone? The CDN was our answer.

And best of all, it will cost you nothing! We're paying for it, even for free sites. Consider it an early Xmas present. Enjoy!!

Where do I get the flights from?

That's our new Twitter comp to celebrate this launch. Check out www.moonfruit.com/flymeto.html.

So there you have it. Most of your sites are already running on the CDN, but for those that are not you can take the steps above and accelerate your site globally.

Scheduled Mail Service Maintenance 00:00 - 06:00 GMT 28, 29 and 30 Oct 2009

2009-10-28T17:53:00+00:00

REASON: Network distribution maintenance

PLANNED DURATION: 3 days (limited to a few hours each morning)

NOTES: Our domain partner Gandi will be performing major upgrades to their network distribution infrastructure during the nights of 28 to 30 October. During this time email services will experience a number of intermittent disruptions in connectivity beginning at 12:00am (GMT) with maintenance activities finishing by 6:00am (GMT) each day. We will endeavour to minimise impact to services where possible, but given the scale of the upgrades being performed, most services will encounter at least some disruption. No mail will be lost but access may be restricted and delivery of mail delayed.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this work may cause.

New Release - 27 October 2009 - Finalised New Toolbar

2009-10-26T17:48:00+00:00

Thank you to all of those who provided us with feedback over the past few weeks while the Toolbar has been running in Beta. This has been very helpful to us in ironing out some of those strange little bugs. We're very pleased to announce that the new (and improved) Toolbar is now live! Here's a quick grab of what the final version looks like.

New Moonfruit Toolbar

So what are the differences? Read on, read on...

Bug fixes and improvements
On the road to make it fully ready for everyone to use we've had to fix quite a few little buglets and add a few sprinkles of magic. The highlights of which are:

CTRL key now works again
Keyboard shortcuts now function normally again
@ symbol and backspace now work correctly in Chrome
'-1' error (and '404' on Macs) for large file uploads has been fixed
In Firefox the keyboard nudge, enter, tab keys and cursor will work normally again
'Delete this page' option has been restored to the 'Pages' menu
Domains module now loads in the edit environment (doesn't go back to moonfruit.com)
Loading has been optimised for quicker download and more feedback
Sidebar panels now animate to add a bit of sparkle (we all need sparkle ;-) )

You can still get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

I thought I'd give you a quick summary of the advantages of the new Toolbar from the last blog article. We're really please with how it has turned out and hope you like it too.

New Toolbar highlights
The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)
Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)
HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Here's the original beta release article if you missed it.

And if you want to give it a go why not build your own free website ;-)

So that's it for now. Look out for a further announcement next week with some exciting service improvements...

Our partnership with MOO and free MOO card giveaway!

2009-10-15T17:53:00+01:00

We’ve partnered with MOO, who love to print! You can use your own images, logos and content to customise your own business cards and personal products. Much like Moonfruit, MOO provides easy to use edit tools to customise your business cards and they also love good design.

We came across MOO when we needed to print our own business cards and we loved them so much we thought your might like to use them too for your projects and business ventures. We know many of you have fabulous images, designs and logos which you already use for your Moonfruit sites. MOO also think their customers might like to build Moonfruit sites to promote their projects, businesses and communities.

So to kick off the partnership we've been promoting some unique offers to our customers.

MOO customers have been taking advantage of a discount on Moonfruit premium packages and 200 packs of 50 free MOO cards have been snapped up by Moonfruit premium subscribers.

We wanted everyone in the Moonfruit community to participate in the partnership so here's an offer for everyone. 10,000 free packs of 50 MOO cards.

Click here to get your free pack.

Enjoy!

The Moonfruit Team

RESOLVED: Service Distruption 15:30 - 16:20 BST (GMT +1) 15 Oct 2009

2009-10-15T15:39:00+01:00

DETAIL: We are currently experiencing some unexpected problems with our service delivery.

RESPONSE: We are investigating this and expect to have this resolved promptly.

DURATION: We will provide an update on the cause and resolution once completed.

UPDATE: 16:20 BST (GMT +1) 15 Oct 2009

We were performing a routine maintenance operation to expand disk space. This normally requires no downtime, however the operation hung causing a cascading problem which required us to restart the entire service.

Because the restart was unscheduled we took great care to minimise risk. This means that restarting our entire service takes time.

New release - 29 September 2009 - New interface, HTML widget, site copy and more...

2009-09-29T10:00:00+01:00

Yeah, it's release time again! Believe it or not we get just as excited as you do at these times. The months of hard work all come together and we get to push new things out to the Moonfruit-osphere. And this one is a biggy too.

So first things first, the new interface. For those of you who didn't see our sneak preview, this is what it looks like.

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

We're seeing the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years as we drag SiteMaker kicking and screaming into the present and pave the way for the future. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too...

New Toolbar (beta)
Some call it SiteMaker5, some call it Moonfruit+, all we know is we call it the New Toolbar. It's been launched as an opt-in beta version, which means it's fully functional, you can choose it, you can use it, but you're not forced to. We're looking for feedback - good and bad (constructive) - so that we can polish it off for a final release at a later stage. But it works and in our testing so far makes things far quicker and easier to do.

To get to it, login to your site and go to 'View' --> 'New Toolbar (beta)'. Your site will reload in the new environment but you can revert to the old style toolbars at any time. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)

The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are used today. When we started many years ago we built a 'Page editor' whereas today SiteMaker allows the management of your website over its whole lifecycle. From initial build -> monitoring traffic and performance -> developing community -> monetisation -> ongoing updates.

Copy/transfer site
Some new features in the 'Admin' section are the copy site and transfer site features. This allows you to create a copy of the design and structure of your site which you can use as the basis of a new site. Please note this isn't a complete copy like backup, as some data is not copied, e.g. individual posts in comment feeds or forums. But the text, images, design, structure, etc., are all applied to the new site.

The transfer site feature allows you to transfer an existing site (or a new copy) to another user of Moonfruit.

Both features have been asked for many times, both by customers that want to build more sites themselves and by resellers who find they want to build similar sites for clients in similar industries over and over. These new features will help make that easier to achieve.

The HTML widget
You can't add HTML to a Flash site, don't be ridiculous! Or can you ;-) ? Some of you will have been using the Beta version of this widget for some time now, but for others this will be new. The HTML snippet widget allows you to paste in HTML code (or markup for the purists out there) that you might find elsewhere (Amazon affiliates, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.) into your Moonfruit website and use it seamlessly with our other features. The changes/improvements for this release are:

The widget now works in all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and on PC and Mac
Works with all HTML snippets (probably - we can't find any yet it doesn't work with, but I'm sure you will ;-)
Some regularly used services (Youtube player, Twitter feed, etc.) have some preconfigured widgets (snippets) available to help you get started (use the 'Setup' tab to get the HTML code)

So this new feature makes available all Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more. Happy hunting!!

But remember, this still only works if you have the Flash 10 player!! Currently FP10 has around 86% penetration according to Adobe but growing by 3-4% per month.

Product selling page templates
There are now some new product selling page templates with suggested layouts for creating easy to use product pages on Moonfruit. You can do this in the 'Add page' option in the 'pages' menu.

For those of you waiting, these are not the long awaited e-commerce updates, so apologies about that, but we are still working towards that goal and the interface lays yet further foundations for the e-commerce tools that will require these new technologies to work as well as they can.

Anyway, so that's about it. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think! Enjoy!

Known issues with new beta toolbar (keyboard shortcuts)

Keyboard shortcuts, such as copy, paste and delete among others, do not work in the beta toolbar
The Ctrl key does not work, e.g for multiple select and for drag select or for forcing links to work in edit mode
In Firefox, keyboard nudge, enter and tab keys do not work and the cursor will not flash in any text field

Sneak Preview: Radical Overhaul of Moonfruit Sitemaker Edit Environment

2009-09-22T11:24:00+01:00

We love the autumn(fall)! After a refreshing summer break everyone's 'back to school', sleeves rolled up and raring to go! The Moonfruit team is no exception: we're dying to show you the new product improvements we've been working on over the last few months.

One of the areas we've wanted to improve and simplify for several years now is the editing workspace for Moonfruit. We wanted to provide old Moonfruiters with quicker access to hidden power-user tools and to help newbies get to grips with customising their websites faster and even more intuitively. So here's a glimpse of what's coming very soon...

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

Pages section (click to enlarge image).

Admin section (click to enlarge image).

And that's not all. Our next release will have a few extra tasty goodies too (the eagle eyed will spot some in the sneaky pics). Watch this space ....

POSTPONED: Scheduled Downtime 06:00 - 08:00 BST (GMT +1) 25th Sep 2009

2009-09-22T11:20:00+01:00

REASON: Data cleansing and archiving

PLANNED DURATION: 2 hours

NOTES: To improve the efficiency of our database, we plan to archive legacy data. This operation needs to be done off-line, that is all websites must be taken off-line for this period. Customers will be shown a page advising them that their site is unavailable and will be back up shortly.

We apologise for any inconvenience.