We like typography. As developers, we have worked hard over the years to support the various ways available to our design partners to bring their typographic vision to our clients' websites.

In the early days, we mostly just chopped out images or used some scripting to dynamically replace your text with graphics showing the text in the appropriate typeface. We've also done several sites that made use of the sfir & cufón techniques for text-replacement. More recently, we have made use of our Typekit account to bring their large & ever-growing library of fonts to websites, as well as the even-newer Google Web Font library to apply stylish typography to our sites.

I'm pleased to introduce Ryan Sutton, our newest developer here at Pencilneck!

Ryan's actually been here a little while now - many of you have had a chance to meet him by phone or email already. He's the friendly one who's been emailing you status updates on your requests lately, fielding your phone calls and generally being available for you.

Due an urgent hardware issue, we will be taking our primary database server offline at 1:30 AM PST on May 3rd, 2011. We expect that your website will be offline and inaccessible for approximately 30 minutes during this time. We closely monitor our hardware and software to prevent any unexpected downtime. We were alerted this morning to this issue, and are taking measures to perform preventative care on your website.

Due to the nature of the issue, we determined that it was critical it be fixed as soon as possible. If you have any questions or concerns about this required hardware maintenance, please contact Steven Tannock at 604-676-3690 ext. 108 (toll-free: 1-888-775-3690), or reply to this email.

Please note that during this time your email will continue to work without interruption - this will only affect your website.

As always, the best way to learn about any issues relating to your website is to follow Pencilneck Software on Twitter, or like us on Facebook

With Google now including Page Load speed in their page-ranking algorithm, many of our clients started asking us how fast their sites load. There’s lots of developer tools that can help with this – I use (alternately) the Google Page Speed tool and Yahoo! YSlow during development to tweak page load times. But this doesn’t help our clients very much.

There’s a chart you can use on Google Webmaster Tools, but overall, I don’t find Webmaster Tools particularly end-user friendly. The chart that Google Webmaster Tools spits out can be found under “Labs”, then “Site Performance”. It looks like this:

As you all know, we here at Pencilneck Software have long used Google Analytics to power your website's statisitics, providing you with the best, most accurate, most powerful analytics software available. However, this great information was often slightly out of reach to our clients because it required you not only to go to a different a website (Google Analytics) but also required our clients to remember yet another username and password.

So, today, we are pleased to announce the integration of Google Analytics with the Pencilneck CMS. We're rolling this out slowly on an on-demand basis while we work out any remaining kinks. For now, we've implemented this integration in two places:

Logging in to your Pencilneck CMS today, you may have noticed some changes in the appearance here and there. Over the past couple of weeks, Pencilneck Software has spent some time making cosmetic changes to the site that should make it a more pleasant experience all round. These updates include:

We're pleased with the results of these upgrades and we hope that you like them too. We expect to launch another round of usability updates, including support for the Internet Explorer & Safari browsers later this summer.

Pencilneck Software Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of our newest module.
The Pencilneck Platform Image Gallery.

This easy to use gallery system allows you to add in image slideshows to news items, blog items, products and to each web page.

The new IE 8 web browser has been released by Microsoft.

This browser seams to be more compatable with websites that are W3C complient.

Database Management in one of the least respected and talked about arts in technology.

The DBA is responsible for installing and upgrading updates and patches to the database server, monitoring the health of the database server, using storage properly, managing database users / security and most importantly backup and recovery of all databases.

JQuery is a great, compact resource available to all whom what to have rich, interactive websites with minimal overhead.

The library is ever expanding, and tying this JavaScript framework into older websites is a breeze.