There are two new nuggets of pure gold in the growing list of Site Builder 3 assets! The first, added by Bryon "Anakin" Noel, is a custom map asset that allows you to plot multiple locations onto a Google Map.

EDIT: July 2, 2010 - Bryon has taken the map offline for a few days to add plotting by coordinates to the map. It'll be back up soon!

This asset will allow you to give users an overview of any kind of location-based content you have, from strawberry fields to fields of dreams. The new feature also ties into Bryon's "Directions" asset, so your users can highlight a location and request directions AND NEVER LEAVE YOUR SITE. Amazing!

The...

Feed me, Seymour

Just a quick update for all of you Site Builders out there! The import routine is complete and in testing right now. So far, the results look promising, and I hope to release it division-wide next week.

Here's what you get/don't get when you run it:

It imports all files, programs, subpages, newsletters and subscribers from a Site Builder 2 site into a new Site Builder 3 site.

It does NOT import surveys, calendar events and datastores. These will be imported by the loving hands of a qualified member of your ANR Web Action Team. We will do this when you are ready to "go live" with your new site, and...

Many of you have now been trained on or at least "shown" Site Builder 3. It's magical, yes? Like a break-dancing unicorn, a king-size bed made of donuts, an Apple iPad that's actually useful.

Site Builder 3 is already in wide use with new sites being added daily. Since we've had no migration utility to move Site Builder 2 sites into the new system, we've encouraged users to recreate smaller sites when possible.

We've done this not only because the migration utility remains MIA, but also because sites *should* be remade every couple of years. Refreshing the content and examining the sites weaknesses usually brings great improvements to usability and the organization of content.

Now that I've got that out of the...

ANR is getting a new webserver- and we're making a BIG upgrade.

The current ANR webserver churns along all day, every day- serving up a lot of web pages.  In fact, we server up more pages that we can really count.  A conservative estimate from 2009 shows our web server delivering over 113 million pages.

That equals about 310,000 per day.  Or 12,916 per hour.  Or 215 per minute.  Or 3.5 per second.  

Honestly, serving up 3.5 pages per second is not a big deal. But these 'average' numbers don't reflect the reality of the traffic we get.  For instance, most of this traffic comes during the 12 hour period of 6am to 6pm- making us much busier during those hours.  And...