Latest News

Once your website is up and running, you will want to let search engines know about it so that they can start indexing your content. We have just released two new functionalities that will make the process easier and more efficient:

• Website verification with Google Webmaster Tools
• Automatic sitemap.xml file generation

A while ago we developed our own little in-house system to fight comment spam on UGAL. Using non rocket science, we were able to catch the vast majority of spam submitted to our websites. Unfortunately, we still have pages with tens of spam comments that our system is not able to catch.

So let's try again, with rocket science this time: as of a week ago, UGAL is using Akismet to detect comment spam. Akismet is a product of Automattic, the developer of Wordpress (the blog platform). Everytime a comment is made to your website, we run it through Akismet in the background to determine if it is spam or not.

The initial numbers look good, but we still have spam that goes undetected. Chances are that it is due to our implementation (we are supposed to report false positives to help the system learn from its mistakes, which we do not for now). We are confident that we will be able to improve the situation in the coming weeks. In the mean time, we encourage you to turn comments off on the pages targeted by spammers (they seem to always like the same ones).

A personal note to the spammers: me like you not.

We we launched the latest version of our Rich Text Editor, we chose to disallow widgets from being embedded in pages created with UGAL. Mostly for technical and for security reasons. As widgets become more popular some have actually proven to be useful for business websites. So we have decided to open the gates, and the Rich Text Editor now allows you to embed any type of widget.

Big day for UGAL today. After many months of development and testing, we are happy to bring live a new feature for your website: Intranets.

An option for all our customers (planA, planB and planC), Intranets allow you to protect your entire website or portions of it and give it "member only" access.

Our Content Management System has been updated over the last few days with a new version of its Rich Text Editor. The update is automatic and free and is now available to all the websites created with UGAL.

With always more websites hosted with UGAL, it was time to revisit the network architecture that was in use since UGAL launched. We are happy to report that the project is now completed, and that you should experience a pretty dramatic increase in the speed at which web pages are delivered from our servers to your web browser.

While we were at it we worked at improving the time it takes to generate the pages of your website. Queries to our databases are now (much) faster and more data is cached in memory for faster rendering. Our goal is to never spend more than 200ms (milliseconds) to generate any page of your website. We are well below the mark for most of the pages we serve, and are still tweaking the few remaining "slower" pages.

Contact us at support@ugal.com if you think of an area where UGAL could do better. A few milliseconds shaved here and there add up to improvements that us, the humans, can feel.

Enjoy faster websites!

You can now login to your website from your own domain name, not only from its ugal.com address. Simply go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/login and enter your email and password. Or click the "login" link at the bottom of every page of your website.

Our CSS Design Kit has been updated and version 2.2 is now available for download. The update reflects the changes made to UGAL over the last few months.

UGAL's CSS Design Kit is a reference for web designers who design their client's websites on top of UGAL. It details the HTML markup generated by our Content Management System and gives them instructions on how to decorate it using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

If there is a designer you'd like to work with for your website, send him/her to http://www.ugal.com/designers. Your website will look exactly as you specify while you still benefit from the Content Management capabilities of UGAL.

Email designers@ugal.com for any questions about designing websites powered by UGAL.

Product Catalogs and Portfolios are among the first pages to benefit from the new interface, with new and improved photo management features:

• Uploading photos is now much easier.
• Photos can be re-ordered by single drag and drop.
• Legends can be attached to photos.
• Photos can be displayed in a slideshow.

When editing a product or a project, there is now a "Photos" tab dedicated to the management of the associated photos:

A Favicon (favorite icon) is the small icon associated with a website that is displayed by most web browsers in the address bar and next to a website bookmark. The favicon adds to your website overall feel and helps your visitors identify your website among other bookmarks and open tabs: