We are gearing up for a major new feature here on Net-at-hand that we will talk more about in the coming days and weeks, but one new feature that we threw in with the mix is a new audio player that is built using Adobe Flash.
The new audio player will remove some of the inconsistencies that were coming up when trying to play audio files in different browsers.
Until now, we have used this blog to tell you about issues that net-at-hand may be experiencing. The blog can work well for that, unless something catastrophic happens and net-at-hand is down completely (this site is published with net-at-hand).
For this reason we have created a twitter account that we will post updates to whenever something goes wrong. You can follow it at twitter.com/net_at_hand. We will probably post about the issues after the fact on this blog, but for real-time information you should go to the twitter page to see what’s going on.
Over the last several weeks, contact form submissions have not been working properly on any Net-at-hand websites. We fixed the problem as soon as we became aware of the situation. Contact form submissions are now functioning as intended.
The problem arose because of some coding changes we made in the system which kept the form submissions from being processed.
We sincerely apologize for this problem and any inconvenience it may have caused you.
A Net-at-hand user asked what they could do to help get their website listed high in search engine results, so I decided to write an article for the help site that gives some principles for SEO (search engine optimization).
You can find it here. Enjoy!
Adding compatibility for Net-at-hand with Internet Explorer has been on our to-do list for a long time (to be completely honest, we didn’t really have a problem “encouraging” our customers to use a better browser), but the rendering bugs that Internet Explorer has always had were beyond quick fixes so it kept getting put off.
Well, it seems that Microsoft decided to finally build a better browser and correctly render pages that conform to published standards when they released “Internet Explorer 8”http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx.
We are pleased to let you know that Net-at-hand works perfectly fine with the new Internet Explorer 8, so feel free to give it a try.
We made a change to the page titles (normally displayed in the menu bar when viewed in a browser) when a Net-at-hand web page is displayed in order to better optimize those pages for search engines.
Previously, the name of the site was placed there, followed by a dash, followed by the title of whatever content was being rendered.
What we have done is switch the order of that so the content title is displayed first. Search engines place more importance on the first area than they do on the second area. This will allow you to better use the titles of your site’s content to target certain terms with search engines.
We recently added a new field to the admin area in your Net-at-hand website which is called “title search”. Basically, this gives you an easy way to find content in your site.
As the size of your website grows, it might get harder to navigate to the content you want to edit. The title search will let you look for items based on their title name. Anything that is not in the garbage will show up in the search results.
It may not be very fancy, but I hope it helps you get the job done more easily.
We are coming up on two years that Net-at-hand has been in production and we are very pleased with how everything has progressed so far. Net-at-hand has proven to be a stable and robust platform for building websites, and it is only going to get better.
One thing about running a successful web application like Net-at-hand is that we must always be prepared to grow. As more people start to use the service, more strain is placed on the resources that run that service.
So the time has come to take the next step which is to upgrade the server that Net-at-hand runs on. To this end, we will be taking Net-at-hand down tonight (4/3) at 12:00 am EDT. We are expecting the time that the server will be down to be about 10 minutes, but it could take upward to 60 minutes.
Basically what we are going to be doing is setting Net-at-hand up on a new server instance that will double the size of the server. This will let us handle the increased traffic (and file uploads) better.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about anything.
UPDATE—The server upgrade went very smoothly, though it ended up taking over an hour and a half before we got everything back up and running. But the system is seems to be performing well. Let us know if you notice any issues.