Karelia Software

Well, the last 15 hours have been interesting, to say the least. Most of our back-end databases stopped functioning some time around 5:30 PM (California Time) Saturday evening. We just now managed to restore service.

This outage probably didn't affect a lot of people, but for those who did, we apologize for the interruption!

The databases affected were our payment processing system, so people who tried to purchase Sandvox would have had issues; our customer and mailing lists databases, which means attempts to subscribe or unsubscribe from our mailing lists would have failed; our page counter database, so people with Sandvox sites that have page counter pagelets installed would have missed some updates; and our database that Sparkle (the application updating engine) connects to, so attempts to check for new updates to Sandvox or iMedia Browser would not have worked.

We are still investigating the root cause of the problem (or really, asking our Internet Service Provider to look into the issue) but we are relieved that our systems are back on-line. If you have any concerns, please drop us a line and we'll try to get things resolved ASAP.

One of the nice updates in the new Sandvox 1.5 is the seven new designs. This is a little tour of them.

Many people ask (OK, nobody asks, but maybe somebody is curious) where these design names come from. Really, it depends. Usually it's inspired by something in the design itself.  Sometimes the designer him/herself will come up with something and it just sticks. Or, we'll pick an idea out of the air, or a song title, or a book….

Without further ado, here are some thumbnails. Each of these screenshots have a custom banner element applied; you can add your own imagery to make the design truly yours.

"Stars" is pretty obvious. We like the way that hovered items show a star over certain menu and title elements when you hover the mouse over them.

We have a lot of blue-themed designs, so how do you invoke the idea of blue but without saying blue?

Sometimes a literal name just fits. This design name reminds us of a fine liqueur or chocolate.

Another literal name; this is one of our few designs that stretches to fit the enclosing browser window.

Here's a title inspired by a song title. Of course there are many artists with a song "Into the Blue" such as the Mission, Manual, Heaven 17, Moby, and so on.  We'll let you decide which one fits this look. No, we haven't seen the Jessica Alba movie of the same name.

The "Minty Fresh" name started out with the mint-green color of the design. We got our inspiration from a character from a couple of Christopher Moore's books.

"Distinction" was a hard one to name. The bold orange swatch (reminiscent of some popular Wordpress blogs) is certainly distinctive.  It may have helped that Dan recently re-discovered the band "Kitchens of Distinction," and may have been listening to one of their tracks recently.

This concludes our tour of the new designs in Sandvox.  There are forty-three other designs in Sandvox 1.5 (many which have been revamped to allow for custom banners) so check them out!