We have upgraded the media handling functions on the site to include support for WMV, MPEG, PDF and SWF. What this means is that all artists have greater ranges of presentation tools; you can now add video, Flash and Adobe Reader files to the Artistic Network.

With the change, we have increased music and video size limits to 8MB.

We have not finalized the upgrade as we have not found a solution for adding streaming content to Windows Media Player on the Macintosh. Music and video has been tested on Windows systems in both Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. We cannot estimate the timeframe for supporting the Mac—which currently accounts for approximately only 1 percent of our members and visitors combined.

We are hoping to get support for the Mac streaming content working. So if any members know anything about getting ASF play lists to work on the Macintosh, we would appreciate any and all support.

Another upgrade this week was a change in the way member hit counters work. Hit counters will not increment when the author of a page views it while logged in. While other visitors will continue to increment hit counters, the site will know when the author is viewing the page and will not count that as a hit.

The intent of the hit counter upgrade is to give a more honest estimate of the traffic our site is helping to generate for you. It also encourages members to help promote our site—by driving traffic to your pages on our site, you increase your hits and help us grow at the same time. (We have put thousands of man-hours in developing a free resource for artists and many artists have not even linked to us from their sites after months of use.)

Future upgrades will include a new page to display artists with videos on the site. We will also continue to look into the Macintosh compatibility issue for Windows Media Player.

As always, we appreciate any and all feedback, including ideas for improving the site and constructive criticisms.

More details about recent upgrades are linked below.