Voting closes tomorrow for the Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards. We’re proud to be a finalist and really want to win it all! Voting closes this Friday, October 3rd and we need your vote! Please visit: http://www.thestandard.com/awards/tis100/categories — click on the “community” category and vote for SynthaSite.
We’re excited to announce that our own Vinny Lingham (founder and CEO of SynthaSite) is in the running as a finalist for ITWeb’s IT Personality of the Year 2008 Awards. He is up against CEO’s and founders of top IT companies in South Africa such as Datacentrix, BSG and T-systems. The competition is tough and he needs your vote.
Voting closes on Sunday, Oct 5th so vote now at: http://www.itweb.co.za/events/itpersonalityoftheyear/2008/
We wanted to let you know that we’ve made changes to our privacy policy and posted the new policy on the site. Please review our new policy at http://www.synthasite.com/privacy. You can always email support@synthasite.com if you’d like to opt out of the new policy. Unfortunately, opting out means we’d have to close your account. We don’t want to do that, so we hope you find the changes acceptable.
Service has now been restored to the hosting environment and all published sites should now respond as usual.
An unusual combination of events caused a temporary networking hiccup to become a bigger problem that affected our hosting environment. We’ve identified a way to avoid this type of failure in future, and will be implementing it shortly.
We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your support as we work to improve our service.
We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Users may get an error when trying to access published sites. We are investigating the problem and hope to have the service restored as quickly as possible.
We apologize for this service interruption and will post updates here as soon as the problem is resolved.
SynthaSite did another new release today. Here are some great new features for your website:
1) Password Protection: Assign a single log in and password to some or all of the pages on your website. Find this feature by clicking the on the Site Manager tab in SynthaSite. Click on the “Password protection” link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions.
2) Full integration to Widgetbox: Access to over 60 000 widgets such as games, chatrooms, media players, guestbooks or hit counters. Quickly add any widget of your choice to your site with a few simple clicks!
3) Three new themed styles. More options for your website! Theme: Education. Style names: Innovation, KidsCorner, LittlePeoplesWorkshop Style Features: Each style allows you to upload a custom banner header.
4) Meebo Rooms: Drag & drop a free, customized Meebo Chat Room onto your website. Find it in the in the content sidebar on the right hand side of your screen.
Test them out and tell us what you think!
To view the full release notes, click here.
We are proud to announce that SynthaSite is a finalist in the Industry Standard Innovation 100 awards!
Thank you to everyone who voted for us.
There will be one “winner” per category based on the most community votes in each category, so you have another opportunity to show your love for SynthaSite. We need your help, so Vote Now!
At around 21h00 PST on Wednesday night 30 July, our Site Builder
service became unavailable to users. This was due to a hard disk
failure on a critical server. There was a backup drive waiting to take
over, but for a reason still unknown to us, it did not happen. The
Site Builder (the service you log in to in order to create, edit and
publish sites) was down for about two hours while we diagnosed the
problem and switched over to our failover systems. The published sites
were never unavailable so there was no disruption for the users of
your sites.
Hardware failure is something we know will happen from time to time,
no matter how many preventative measures are put in place. So as
engineers we plan and rehearse for it so that we are able to respond
with least disruption to our user base. In this instance the longest
part of the downtime was spent making sure we knew exactly what had
gone wrong so that we could make the correct decisions for recovery
without compromising the integrity of any data.
I want to extend an apology to all users who were unable to log in
during this time. During such incidents you are foremost in our minds
while we work to bring everything online again.
SynthaSite is uncompromising in our commitment to optimal availability
and reliability of the platforms that run both the Site Builder and
the sites you host with us. We have asked the data centre where the
server is hosted to investigate the reason for it not automatically
failing over to another drive, and will take steps to prevent this
from happening in the future.
We’ve just rolled out our latest set of feature updates. The major highlight of this release is the integration of the Widgetbox Gallery to the toolbox. Now you can browse, search and easily add widgets from WidgetBox’s wide selection of over 60 000 widgets - all from the comfort of your own SynthaSite! This makes it even easier to incorporate things like games, chat, video, social networking and much more straight into your website. Look for it in the “Contents” sidebar directly under the “File” widget.
We have also added a new tutorial to our increasingly comprehensive support section. The “How To Use Your Own Domain Name With SynthaSite” tutorial explains in detail the process of registering and configuring your own domain to point to your website.
As always, for a more detailed update on what’s new and exciting at SynthaSite, check out the latest release notes.
