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 New this Month |
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In March, we began an overhaul of the Artspan member admin Control Panel.
First, the member login was reworked to add an extra layer of security. This new login did cause some problems for members trying to log in, but these problems were resolved with the members clearing their cache files. Instructions for doing this are in the login page, should you need them.
Second, the top row of buttons in your member admin Control Panel (member admin) page have changed.
Website Pages button (top right – formerly called the Navigation Bar button) will now control your Home Page in addition to the other pages on your site. You will have much more flexibility in designing a homepage. The procedure will be much like that used to create any other page. Tthe only difference is that you will see some regions predefined with dotted lines. This was done to better enable the transfer of existing homepages, but the dotted lines may well be useful in designing your page.
To edit your current homepage or create a new homepage:
- Look for Home in the Name of Navigation Link column. Click on Edit.
- In the page that opens, choose 1 in the Sort Order drop-down so that the Home page shows first on your navigation bar.
- In the textbox, the dotted lines define different regions of the page. You can add/edit/delete text and/or images in any region.
- Use the Upload/Edit/Insert Image icon to add an image. This is the second icon from the right in the second row of icons below the textbox. Click to get a pop-up window. In that window, on the left, click on Insert, then click on the green arrow to the right of To upload click the icon with the green arrow. Find (Browse) an image in your computer and click on it. Then choose a size to upload. If you choose 400 pixels, the image will be uploaded with 400 pixels as the maximum dimension height or width. Click insert.
- Hold the Shift key and Drag on the corner of each image to resize the image. You may need to make the image(s) smaller to have them show in one row. You can place the image(s) on the page using the left/center/right align icons.
Billing Information button(top left)- coming April 2. This is information Artspan needs to manage your account with us. Billing and contact information. None of this shows on your site, and the information is secure. Please keep it updated.
Site Information button (top middle)- coming April 2.: Your site title (if the title for your site is not your name), meta tag information for search engines, category drop-downs and more. Much of this was in the About You button which has been replaced by the Billing Information button..
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Portals Developments: News Feeds and New Portals |
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RSS News Feeds
We finished the work on creating an administrative interface to give us the capability to assign news articles to the different portals. If you visit the portals (see the links below), you will see a lot of new articles on the contemporary scene. This is an important step in making the portals as rich in features and content as we can. We aim to get more visitors to artspan.com and through to your sites. These articles should also be useful in improving our search engine rankings for terms associated with each portal.
This is a very important development and one we have been working on for several months.
New Portals
We launched two new portals in the last couple of weeks:
Nature Photography and
Photojournalism.
This brings our Portals line-up to 19, with many more on the way. Here is the current line-up. Coming this week are the Pastels and Art in New York portals.
We are now able to feature more member work on each main Portal page, so if you see that your work is not being featured in the corresponding portals, please make sure that you have highlighted the right categories for your searchable works in the image detail page corresponding to that image.
All portals work is the responsibility of Nina Alvarez, our new Portals Editor and Internet Marketing Manager. She is a poet, a writer, a photographer, an artist and is very savvy about the Internet. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, please email her at portals@artspan.com
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Important Domain Name Questions |
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Can you answer these questions about your domain?
- where did you purchase the domain?
- do you know when to renew your domain?
- do you know your login info with your domain registrar
Why is this important? You have spent a lot of time promoting this domain, and you will lose it if you don’t renew it on time. Domains are often snapped up by someone else when they expire. So, its important to stay on top of this.
By the way, a company called Domain Registry of America (aka Liberty Names of America, Domain Registry of Europe, and Domain Registry of Canada) continues to send out renewal notices warning of ominous consequences for not renewing domains (with them). This practice (called "domain slamming") by this company has long been under fire by government agencies in North America and Europe. Read more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/06/court_bars_canadian_domain_slammer/
Bottom line: Throw the letter away. It’s a scam.
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Artspan Prints |
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Regarding our planned artspanPrints initiative, which will allow visitors to order up prints of member work (and resize, mat and frame), the first step for us is to completely automate our billing system. This work begins this week. We were a bit delayed by various bug fixes and other matters, and had been looking for additional programming help. Happily, Rodney Oliver who was with us for the first five years of Artspan has agreed to come back to help out with this and other projects. We don’t yet have a target date for the launch of artspanPrints.com .
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New Free Version of Photoshop |
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The best of the imaging programs now has a free version online. Go here https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html
You can crop, work with the color and contrast, sharpen and more. Very easy to use.
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Featured Websites |
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| Kim Kimbro |
| Paintings |
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| I feel compelled to march in the long procession of animal representation that reaches all the way back to the caves at Lascaux and Altamira. Early man scratched marks on the walls with ground pigment so that others could recognize the animal and conjure its spirit - then it could become the killed rather than the killer. That primitive bargain is the starting point for each painting, where it is decided, metaphorically, who lives and who dies. They are cyphers that stand in for the way we are -- corruptible and faithful, fickle and steadfast….I paint from the inside out, starting with the deepest essence of that animal, letting those qualities determine the way paint and composition are handled.
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| Kerry Stuart Coppin |
| Photography of Urban Africa and the Diaspora |
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| He has used photography as a means to explore the African American cultural identity and communal experience. In recent years he has extended his photographic research to include people of African heritage both in the New World and on the African Continent, traveling and photographing in Barbados, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Cuba, Egypt, and Senegal. The photographs illustrate neighborhoods, families, workers, and day-to-day activities. Coppin states, “My visual research is a means of bridging international borders...” |
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Legal and Other |
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Copyright 2008. Artspan LLC. All rights reserved.
All images are the property of their respective owners. The opinions expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect those of artspan.com members.
Thoughts or ideas for future newsletters? ask@artspan.com
Technical questions or problems? www.artspan.com/help
Visit www.artspan.com today! |
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