22Slides

We never get political, but the ability to own a website that everyone can visit is in danger, and that directly affects us, our clients, and basically every everyone that owns a website or uses the internet in general.

Internet service providers are trying to divide the web into different packages like they already do with cable, only allowing access to the websites you pay for and blocking those you don’t, or those they don’t want you to see.

If you like having an effective website for your small business, please make some phone calls today. It’s the last day to influence your representatives before they vote.

This page has more detail about what’s going on and provides very easy instructions for what you can do:http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/only-you-can-protect-net-neutrality_13.html

We’ve just made it possible to add Adobe Lightroom galleries to your website! This is great for sending quick galleries to clients for proofing, without having to add them to your primary website.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have our Dropbox File Manager add-on enabled (If you don’t, we have instructions here).
2. Export an HTML web gallery from Adobe Lightroom. Please note that it needs to be HTML, as Flash galleries will not work.
3. Place your Lightroom gallery files in your Dropbox/Apps/22Slides folder and give Dropbox a few minutes to sync your files.
4. That’s it! Your gallery will now be accessible to anyone. You can view your gallery by going to YourWebsite.com/files and navigating to the folder you just created (You may have to click “index.html” to view the gallery).

And some things to keep in mind:

• As stated, Flash galleries will not work, though it’s normally best practice to avoid Flash anyway, unless absolutely necessary.
• Lightroom galleries don’t count against your total image limit with 22Slides. You can have as many images as your Dropbox account can hold.
• Other HTML files/websites are also supported, not just Lightroom galleries. Theoretically, you can put any HTML-based website in your Dropbox/Apps/22Slides folder and it will get published online.

22Slides happened to launch on April Fools in 2011 and over the past three years has grown into something well beyond anything we expected. We sincerely thank all of you and hope you’ll continue to allow us to serve you for years to come.

As always, we’ve been hard at work to improve. Here’s what we’ve done recently!

Blog Comments

We released a versatile new add-on which allows users to comment on your blog posts.

New Centered & Right-Aligned Headers

Ever try to center your navigation bar above your content? While possible, it wasn’t always easy, so we added a new “alignment” option to the design editor that allows you to align your logo and navigation to the top, right or left of the page.

Better & Faster Server Architecture

We upgraded our servers to solid state drives, greatly improved database performance, implemented new backups systems, and increased system redundancy to make sure we’re providing the absolute best-performing and most reliable system possible.

Improved Image Compression & Quality

We periodically review our image processing to see if new methods or technologies are available to improve quality. We recently found a few areas we were able to squeeze a little more quality into the images.

Improved ‘Tiles’ Layout

The responsiveness of the “Tiles” layout (the one that looks like Pinterest) has been greatly improved by loading images one at a time, rather than waiting until the entire set loads before displaying anything.

Other Stuff

• Added reminder to front-end website when placeholder is enable, to make sure placeholders aren’t accidentally left on.
• Improved image description layout for sideways-scrolling galleries on full-screen “header” sites.
• Made collections/group pages automatically center for header-wide layouts on different sized screens.
• Improved Retina display support with misc graphics.
• Fixed bug that caused some images to not load all the time on “tiles” gallery layouts.
• Fixed bug that caused page footers to be displayed incorrectly with certain layouts on some mobile devices.
• Changed Tumblr image posts to link to dedicated page, where comments are available, instead of straight to the raw image file.

We just added comment counts for for blog pages, so it’s easy to see than you can comment and how many comments there are, as well as provide an obvious link to get to the comments.

To use blogs, you’ll need to enable the Tumblr add-on (http://help.22slides.com/article/blog), and to get comments, you’ll need to enable the Disqus add-on (http://help.22slides.com/article/blog-comments).

We just introduced a new “alignment” option that allows you to align your logo and/or navigation to the left (default), right, or center.

It may seem like a small update, but it opens up lots of possibilities for new design configurations, like having a centered, full-width website like Harry Glazier’s site, centering your sidebar like Lauren Beck’s site, having your logo on the left side and your navigation on the right, or lots of other things.

It’s already enabled in your design editor for the logo and navigation elements. We’re excited to see what people can do with it!