Web Widgets March 2007 News

In this issue of WebWidgets News, March 2007

Server upgrades due between 15th March and 25th March.
Emma is on holiday from Friday 16 March to Wednesday 28 March. Reuben will be answering her emails.
VOIP phones provide city-based local calling numbers for businesses based in remote places
Managing Bulk Photos and Watermarking
Bulk Emailer Changes
Websites of the month

Server Upgrades and Changes to A records

Just to give you some advance warning, we will be once again making a major upgrade to our servers. We are growing rapidly and our international traffic usage is also. We will shortly be moving the majority of our servers into the ICONZ data center, which is situated in downtown Auckland, with our backup systems continuing to operate from the Maxnet facility in Albany.

We do not envision that this will have any affect on the majority of our customers, however, if you have your domain names registered/managed elsewhere, then we will need to provide you with our new A records so that your website will be served from the fastest and most reliable source.

Support Queries

Emma is on holiday from Friday 16 March to Wednesday 28 March. Your emails will be answered by Reuben or Albie during this time. Email support@webwidgets.co.nz. Also, you may have noticed the new "Help" button in your website editing area. This is the first place to find a quick answer to your website building questions. If you don't find the answer in this new Help area, please contact us.

VOIP Phones

We are currently trialing a new VOIP phone from Call Plus, aka ITALK. It costs around $10 per month, and allows you to have a local calling number in any major NZ city, and you can plug this phone into any broadband connection anywhere in the world. eg if someone rings you in Auckland, you could be living in the Coromandel, or India, or Timbuktu. There will be no toll charge for either you or your customers. As soon as Emma comes back from holiday you can start calling her direct on an Auckland number.

Managing Bulk Photos and Watermarking

We have a great new widget for photographers who photograph events and need to make their photos available for sale quickly and easily. After specifying the print sizes allowed, all you need to do is upload the photos using FTP. It's very quick - eg you can leave it to upload 1000 photos over 30 minutes. If you need to watermark or compress a large directory of photos before uploading them, here is a great little application which we use. http://www.smalleranimals.com/thumb.htm (which can do 50 photos at a time for free, or $25 if you want to use it properly. It watermarked 1000 jpegs in 20 seconds)

Bulk Emailer

Our bulk emailer tool makes contacting your customers really simple. Just click your Green "View Members" button, then click "Create Bulk Email Job" and follow the procedure to send a bulk email to your mailing list. (Remember to look for the "Start Job" tab top right when viewing your newsletter) We offer the ability to send up to 1000 bulk emails per month on our $60 hosting plan. (or 5000 emails on our $100 hosting plan) That works out at only 6c per member! (Package includes ecommerce hosting) Please email support@webwidgets.co.nz if you are interested in upgrading your hosting plan to include bulk emailer.

Thanks for the thanks

Many of you thanked us for the technology reviews in the last newsletter. We will try to do more in the future. I note that after 1 month of running Vista on 2 gigs of ram, it's fairly stable, although it slows down a bit as the day wears on (restarting seems to fix). I note that it does have device drivers for most common things I have attempted to plug in, so that has been good also. I tried using the MS Photo editor today, but it did not compress photos or rotate (as we suggest in our photo upload wizard). It was an issue with user permissions on the files when sharing photos between users, but no warnings were given, it just failed to do it. So there are still a few things that MS needs to sort out.