Internet Explorer 8 Release / Squarespace

As you may or may not have heard, Internet Explorer 8 has been released from Microsoft into the wild. As of today, Squarespace is fully compatible with IE8, and we recommend everyone using previous versions of IE upgrade immediately. From our initial testing, IE8 seems to be a major speed improvement over IE7 and has some great debugging tools that will help us ensure IE works better than ever.

That said, Squarespace still recommends Safari and Firefox as our best performing browsers, followed closely by Google’s Chrome (which is built on the same rendering engine as Safari). If you’ve been in Internet Explorer all these years and have a spare moment, take a moment and give one of these a download — you may just be surprised at how responsive the web can be.

Service Interruption: Monday, March 23rd, 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM EDT

Spoke a little too soon about the maintenance window from earlier tonight. At around 7:00 AM EST, we experienced an internal router failure which brought us down for about an hour. During the maintenance from 1-3AM, we were working on expanding our switching infrastructure, so this was directly related to that maintenance window.

So, in effect, instead of being down from 1-3AM EST, we were instead down from 7-8AM EST. We’ll be scheduling another window shortly to ensure this infrastructure is reliable and further revising things in the future.

Squarespace 5.1 Release Notes

Mostly behind the scenes update this evening to prep us for a number of really exciting future changes.  Immediately available:

• Ability to save social credentials in dashboard.  Social links module added.
• New manage posts interface.
• Many UI enhancements across the system, better mode icons + more mode state indicated via editing strips
• New manage comments interface.
• Editor interface improvements.
• Updates to member accounts page to allow searching by login.
• Keyboard control improvements (dialog tabbing, esc+mode changes).
• Bookmarklet support for posting to Journals.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling forward the majority of what this release will be providing.

Also note, if you’re seeing odd display in any areas of the system — you very likely have V5.0 code cached that needs to be cleared.  See this guide for clearing your cache:

http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/2008/7/18/clearing-your-cache-for-v5.html

Scheduled Maintenance: Thursday, February 12th, 1:00AM - 2:00 AM EST

(Note: Moved from original date)

Squarespace will be unavailable this coming Thursday, February 12th, 1:00AM - 2:00 AM EST while we perform maintenance in preparation for our next software releases. We anticipate this downtime will last no more than 5 minutes, but have blocked off the hour just to be safe.

Thanks!

Peer1 Power Incident Friday, October 10th at 7:30AM

(Anyone writing in to support got an immediate response on this, but we were waiting for a complete explanation before posting.)

For a period of one hour on Friday, October 10th at 7:30 AM, Squarespace sites were unavailable due to a UPS power outage at Peer1 in New York City, which is our network provider. While Squarespace itself implements proper power planning to ensure that most of our core systems are spread between two power sources, the outage affected Peer1’s core networking equipment which routes data to their entire New York datacenter. When the UPS failed, taking the routing equipment with it, all websites at the datacenter (including Squarespace) were taken offline. The outage lasted one hour.

Upon restoration of power and bringing their network equipment online at 8:30 AM — Squarespace immediately began serving traffic again and all was returned to normal. Squarepsace was alerted to the situation by our external monitors within 60 seconds of the incident, and we were on site while Peer1 restored their equipment.

If anyone has any questions about planning, backup, or redundancy — please write in to support to have them answered. We take this sort of thing extremely seriously, and attempt to provide total transparency regarding the systems you’re hosted on and how things here operate.

Beta Testing New Editor

We’ve got a new version of our WYSIWYG editor ready for testing, and we’re going to be selectively enabling it on a few individuals accounts before beginning to go live with it across the system. Email me at a at squarespace.com if you’d like your account enabled early. (Update 9/23: Thanks guys. More than enough testers! You’re all quite fast :)).

Manager Cleanups

Over the next few days, the following items are being renamed and clarified in the site manager:

• RENAMED: General File Storage shortened to File Storage
• RENAMED: Domain Mapping renamed to Custom Domain
• RENAMED: General Configuration renamed to Website Settings
• RENAMED: Basics tab of Website Settings renamed to Header & Footer
• RENAMED: Blog import / export renamed to simply blog import
• RENAMED: Quick access URLs renamed to Tools & Goodies
• MERGED: Audiences and Audiences Permissions merged into a single page called Member Permissions
• ADJUSTED: Code injection points moved to separate section in Website Settings
• MOVED: Blog export moved into blog configuration screen
• MOVED: Affiliate tab moved into Billing tab
• MOVED: XML Feeds moved to a tab within Journal configuration dialog
• MERGED: Open/Review support tickets merged into a single tab

Should you wish to suggest an additional area for clarification — just write into support. Thanks!

Editor Roadmap / Known Issues

Okay — wanted to post about the state of the WYSIWYG editor, what we’re aware of, what we’re working on, and what we’ll be doing over the next week.

• By mid week, expect to see the full justify and the undo/redo option. Server side spell checking (which we don’t recommend using) will return by the end of the week. Again, spell checking wasn’t removed — all major browsers support this internally (with the exception of IE7, but Google toolbar provides spell checking there), and we wanted to shift people towards doing this. This decision was based on the lead of most other modern web applications today (see Google’s Knol) that assume spell checking is handled in the browser. In browser spell checking is more reliable, accurate, can use custom dictionaries, etc. For the other items, redo/undo is also handled by Control+Z in the interface, and full justify was moved to Fonts & Colors. Given the confusion, we’re going to revert to the way things were.

• We hope to have auto-saving for entry drafts in by the end of the week, which will fully remedy every situation where you could potentially lose a post due to a network timeout or internet issue.

• If you are having trouble uploading images, and you’re in a member account, make sure the member account actually has permission to upload images! We’re seeing a few bugs in the error messages describing this, but Squarespace is actually doing the right thing by blocking the upload. It’s just reporting it wrong.

• Some individuals expressed interest in the percentage based resizing feature — but we’re not sure why. When posting an image to your blog, the V4 interface required three steps: First, you add the image, then you calculate the right ratio to get the image to reduce properly, then you insert the image and actually see if the image looks right. We’ve brought that to one step. The preview is real-time (so you can see what it ACTUALLY looks like in the post), and you don’t have to do math to figure out how big the image should be. If your blog is 500px wide, you resize to 500 each time. This makes it much easier for very consistent looking pictures and thumbnails.

• To create a link on an image, the feature is in the “Additional Options” tab of the image editor. This is an improvement over V4, where it was impossible to tell if an image was linked properly or not. Now — you can be absolutely sure. If it’s in that area, it’s linked — otherwise it’s not.

• We’re aware of a bug where image alignment options appear to be getting cleared on load for older content in IE7 only. A patch for this is going live Monday evening.

• We’re aware of another bug in Firefox involving selecting an ENTIRE paragraph at once, or selecting multiple paragraphs and pressing the link button. Please just select less than the entire paragraph to sidestep this bug for the time being.

If you’re experiencing something that isn’t on this list — please write us immediately with some details on your issue (a so we can remedy things.

Update on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 03:56PM by A. Casalena

Had some feature creep on this. The changes listed are still queued, and we’re modeling things after what Google is doing in their editor across their product line.

August Bandwidth, Storage and Pricing Updates

Now that we’ve refreshed Squarespace with V5, it’s time to refresh our pricing plans too. We’re doing two things:

1) Tonight, bandwidth and storage packages across the system are being raised significantly. Here’s the new breakdown:

• Basic — 1GB Storage, 75GB/mo Bandwidth (1,250% increase)
• Pro — 2GB Storage, 125GB/mo Bandwidth (1,562% increase)
• Advanced — 3GB Storage, 175GB/mo Bandwidth (1,458% increase)
• Business — 4GB Storage, 300GB/mo Bandwidth (2,000% increase)
• Community (formerly called TierII) — 5GB Storage, 400GB/mo Bandwidth (1,300% increase)
• Elite — 20GB Storage, 1TB/mo Bandwidth (500% increase)

The point of our bandwidth pricing is to be reasonable, not to actually place a limit on anyone. Squarespace is a premium service and you should feel quite free of these constraints. If you have an account with normal traffic, and you’re even close to these limits, write in and we’ll help you optimize your site to send less data. If that’s the case — your users will probably notice a massive speedup in your page loads.

If you have previously purchased a bandwidth upgrade from us, and need a refund — there’s no problem! Just write into support and we’ll handle that for you.

2) Our pricing, in light of version 5 as well as these bandwidth changes, is being raised slightly. New pricing follows. The new pricing will go into effect for accounts purchasing service AFTER August 15th 2008 at 11:49PM. As has always been, all old accounts will receive locked-in pricing. Here’s the pricing after the 15th:

• Basic — $8/mo
• Pro — $14/mo
• Advanced — $20/mo
• Business — $30/mo
• Community — $50/mo
• Elite — $200/mo

Note: Slightly adjusted since our original posting.

Update on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 08:25PM by A. Casalena

The changes have been applied, and all bandwidth upgrades have been nullified across accounts, since essentially they’re not necessary anymore. Thanks guys! Let us know if there are any questions or if anything looks strange.

Update on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 03:57PM by A. Casalena

We’re actually going to push the cutoff to Tuesday, August 19th at 11:59PM. We want to get an email out to everyone on a current trial so there’s adequate time and nobody is caught off guard. If you are still caught off guard, drop a line to support after the cutoff date (if your trial was created BEFORE the 19th).

V5 Update

Hey Guys,

We’ve patched over 25 bugs since our release 48 hours ago. This is an update post to let everyone know where we’re at on things. Thanks for everyone’s kind comments and for bearing with us during this large release.

1. We just (as of 4:19AM EST on July 23rd) released a final patch for the “Operation Aborted” messages some users were seeing in IE7 when editing journal entries from very slow computers. Clear your cache to ensure you have our updated code. Other patches were issued to IE7 to remove opacity effects to ensure editing speed. We of course intend to fully support IE7, but due to the limitations of that browser, we’re going to turn off most of the visual components that make V5 so smooth — as we need to ensure a speedy experience. Safari and Firefox 3 are currently blowing IE7 out of the water. While you’re not required to download either, we’d recommend giving them a look!

2. We’re aware of an issue with date selectors in journal entries occasionally loading improperly after an entry is saved. This issue only affects loading — your dates will be correct when saving. We will have a patch shortly.

3. We are addressing a number of WYSIWYG related issues, especially one involving multiple images inserted directly next to one another, and another involving sentence splitting under certain editing situations. Many more WYSIWYG updates are coming. Issues involving linking and selecting files from General Storage are entirely resolved.

4. Server-side spell checking was knowingly removed in V5, but I think we’re going to add it back just to deal with the confusion some people are experiencing. Spell checking is fully implemented in Safari, Firefox 2+3, IE8, and Opera. If you’re in IE7, the Google Toolbar provides spell checking. The benefit of NOT doing this on the server side (as we did in the past) is improved speed, spell checking across all boxes (wysiwyg and textarea), improved accuracy, language awareness, and saved “add to dictionary” entries between systems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you use your browser’s spell checker — but we’ll give the server side as a fallback shortly.

I do also want to mention that we’ll be establishing a more effective email channel for our communications in the future. We should have given more of a heads up to our non-developer customer base on this release — and I don’t think our service posting reached enough people for how large our change was. I apologize for our communication here. We’ll do better.