Skip to main content

Superb Support from Xara

Xara is a software company that started life 20 or more years ago producing software for the much loved Acorn comupters including a vector based drawing package called ArtWorks that was way ahead of its time. Over the last five years I have been using their current drawing package and their web graphics package called WebStyle and I have continued to be impressed.

When the sub-menu problem emerged we carried out the usual checks and made little progress and then asked for help from Xara. After an inital clarification we noticed that on pages like MP3 Ringtones where a lot of elements are loaded (even on broadband this takes a noticeable period of time) the menu worked properly until the page was fully loaded. Xara support followed up that clue and spotted the clash between one of their javascript variables and the code for Hitslink and proposed the modification which we are now rolling out across the site. So full marks to Xara support for their excellent detective work - we didn't notice the impact of the new code from Hitslink when we installed it and so failed to associate cause and effect - a lesson for the future!

Today we also had an encouraging message from The Bassman in Las Vegas and in the spirit of promoting independent instrumental music sites you might like to go and hear some of the samples from his Modern Jazz CDs at
Stephane Bertrand

Have a good day!

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).
Read more
Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 
Read more

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.
Read more