523 Strong!

Earlier today traffic jumped up a bit and we saw 523 visitors using the site simultaneously. Normally this hovers around 450, so we jumped up almost 80 users for a while there!

We know that thanks to a new logging system I put together a couple days ago! Now we'll be able to see all sorts of neat stuff like that!

Some other neat stats:

• Over 300 million banners have been created over the last year.
• Approximately 75 million images are uploaded to be used as backgrounds each year.
• Our current servers can create over 2.5 million banners every day!
  

Funky Characters!

Okay so for the longest time the banner maker has had some trouble with "funky characters" like #, = or & because they're used to tell the banner maker different things about your banner. I'm proud to say that finally it's all fixed. You can use funky characters, including accents, until your falling out of your chair.

You might want to note, though, that not all of the fonts display all of the characters you might want them to. If you see X's or ?'s in place of some of your characters, try using a different font and it just might work!

VIP Logout and Account Page

VIPs, you can now logout by going into your account page and clicking on "Logout" right below the page title.

Unless you're using a public computer, there's really not much of a reason to logout, by the way.

I've also given the account page a really quick makeover. Soon a totally updated page will replace that one and will give you access to more features that we're working on (like renewing your account).

New FAQ System, Change Banner Links (VIPs)

Alright I got a new FAQ system put together that makes it easier for me to add, edit, and remove questions. More importantly, it makes it easier for you to find your question and, hopefully, an answer to it. I'll continue working on it to implement a search or category function sometime in the relatively near future.

There was an issue with the logo being chopped off on most of the pages on the banner maker. That is now fixed.

For all of you VIPs, you can now change the link that you saved your banner with when you generate new code for it. To use it, go to your account, click on View/Edit Saved Banners, click on Get Code for the banner you want to get new code for, and then change the link in the box up under your banner on the Get Code page and click the "Change Link for Code Below" button, and it will update right away.

For the record, this does not update the settings for the banner, so if you edit the banner or get code for it again, it will have the same link it was originally saved with.

Time for Improvements

I'm pretty excited to share with all of you that for at least the next couple of weeks I'll have roughly 20 hours a week to work on MyBannerMaker. This will allow me to make tons of improvements, from new features to bug fixes.

If you have any requests, feel free to post 'em in a comment or email them to me (contact page of the website).

VIPS: Get Banner Code from Saved Banners

I think just about everybody that's a VIP will be thrilled with the way this has been done. Now you can go to your banner list (click on view banners in your account page) and you will see a new option for each banner: 'Get Code'. Just click on that option and you'll be shown a page with the code for every single banner type for that banner...including the instructions. Now you can easily use the same banner for a variety of different uses...headers, regular banners, extended network banners, mastheads, etc.!

Soon I'll be adding in something to allow you to change the link on the fly on that page as well so you can make a single banner and link it to several different places. This works great if you're using your web stats to track where visitors are finding you from...you can change the URL so you notice it in your statistics. It also works great if you have different landing pages for users from different places, but that use the same banner.

Have a good day! :)

Working on VIP Stuff

UPDATE: This is finished so there should not be any issues!

I'm working on VIP stuff right now, so if you're not able to get into your account for some reason be sure to email me so I can let you know how to get in. Your account might be expired if you signed up a while ago!

Update on the June 10th Blog

So far there haven't been any issues with the new setup, so every banner is, in fact, being saved properly to either ImageShack or our own banner servers! Hooray to that!

:)

VIP Updates

I've made some changes in the way banners are deleted so that you get a confirmation page before the banner is actually deleted. This should help with any accidental deletions.

Soon I'll be adding in the much-requested option to get the code for a saved banner. Something even I admit should have been there all along. You'll be able to get code for any banner type for that particular banner, just by selecting that option.

I'll also be cleaning up the page where you view your saved banners...making it easier to see what is what.

Enjoy!

Some Updates for Everyone

It's been about a month since the last blog post here, and for that I apologize. I've been pretty busy lately with other things and have spent the little time I've had for the website on putting in improvements and not really blogging about it.

There have been some improvements to the processing/saving of the banners so every banner should save without any issues. Previously the constant issues with ImageShack's hosting has caused some pretty frequent outages. Now, if ImageShack doesn't successfully host the banner our banner server will take it instead!

A few other glitches have been fixed here and there. Hopefully within the next few weeks I'll have more time to work on the site and get some new features implemented!