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:

1. Your dashboard. If we've rolled out the Google Analytics integration to your website, you'll see a new chart on your homepage, with a series of green & blue bars, showing you the number of visits (green) vs. the number of visitors (blue) to your website over the past 7 days.
2. Your Page Popularity Reports. For each page, we've traditionally shown a rolling total of visits for the paste month. This chart now shows the number of page views for the past month, as well as the number of unique page views, the bounce & exit rates and the average time spent on the page during that time period, all of it linked live from your Google Analytics account.

As always, while we hope that this integration provides you with more immediately useful & meaningful reports, log in to your Google Analytics account for further information and analysis of your website's statistics.

If you're itching to see have your Pencilneck CMS integrated with Google Analytics right away, please contact support and we'll get you set up.

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:

• Faster menus when browsing your web pages, members, newsletters & products. Additionally, the Quick Find feature is now faster as well, making it even more useful than before.
• New Web Pages menu: "Auxilliary Menu". Previously, if your site had an Auxilliary menu, those menu items were mixed in with your main Site map. We've pulled them out and given them priority in their own menu section, so that you can more quickly & easily find these important pages.
• Web Page menu icon key. While you have likely all seen these icons previously in your web page menus, we kept getting the occasional question, asking us what each icon meant. So for your own convenience, we added a menu key at the bottom for you.
• Reorganized Information Panel: What's the most important information for you to see when editing something? The name. So we made it more prominent, to avoid confusion.
• Clearer Save Results text: Whether your updates completed successfully or if there was a problem, it will now be easier for you to see, as the save results box is now more prominent. Additionally, it will now disappear on its own if left alone for a few seconds.
• Improved File Uploader: The file uploader in the CMS has been improved, making it clearer what kinds of files are allowed, as well as providing a better preview icon and post-upload linking.

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.

If you have any questions or comments regarding these updates, please email us.

Image Galley Module Released!

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.

Contact us for more information.

Pencilneck Support Website Launched!

Pencilneck Software is pleased to announce the launch of the video support website.

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

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

( I still prefer Fire Fox and Google Chrome, but as of this post, IE 7 has 24.9% of the marketplace.)

If you are running IE 8, but would like to see what the site renders like in IE 7, you can add a simple meta tag to to the site, making your IE 8 browser render the site as if it were IE 7.

(This is not 100% fool proof...but you can see any glaring issues that the website might have)

I found this code snippet on David Walshe's Blog.

Here at Pencilneck Software, we strive to create perfection when developing websites and web-based applications.

We will be posting our trials and tribulations we encounter during the development process here, in hopes that other developers and clients gain knowledge and respect for the intriguing and at times frustrating tasks of web development.

The personalities you will be hearing from are Steven Tannock, Cory Borg, Jung Moon and me, Trevor Thomas.

Please feel free to comment on our postings as this will enable us all to benefit from the information soon to be provided.

The Pencilneck Team.

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.

Not too long ago, creating similar effects took at least double the implementation time, and three times the amount of code to accomplish in JQuery what you can with a single line.

As stated on many blogs and sites, if you have yet to use the JQuery Library, do so.
You will not regret it.

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.

In a dynamic driven website, the data is the most important component. Without this, there would be no website.

Working at a few different companied across North America prior to joining Pencilneck Software, I have found that development companies are unaware and oblivious at how important it is to have a well thought out database maintenance procedure in place, just in case.

This is where Pencilneck Software outshines all competitors.
We have extensive maintenance, backup and restoration procedures in place, ensuring that in a worst case scenario we can restore all databases within a few hours, with minimal data loss.

A custom database backup script was created to backup and ftp these backups to a secure location, and multiple intervals, ensuring that we are prepared for the worst.

A second script was created to truncate the log files on a regular basis. This ensures that the transaction log files do not grow so large to crash the entire server, or prevent any new transactions from being run.

Next time you see your Database Administrator, buy him or her a coffee and let them know that you do appreciate the unseen / unmentioned work they do.