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LexiConn ShopSite Newsletter – December 2006
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In this month’s issue:
- Remember to backup your ShopSite databases
- Creating perfectly sized popups
- Happy Holidays from LexiConn

The latest version of ShopSite is: 8.1.3.1

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Remember to backup your ShopSite databases

Although we have developed an extensive backup system (more on this below) for our clients’ data, making your own backups, especially in ShopSite, is an important and often helpful step. ShopSite allows for an easy method to backup your pages, products, coupons, etc…

In your ShopSite backofice, you can create a backup of your data at:
Utilities -> Database -> Backup

We highly recommend doing this prior to uploading new pages or products, or making any changes to your pages or products in the backoffice. If you run into a problem, delete the wrong products, cause corruption, etc… you can easily restore from this backup right in the backoffice:
Utilities -> Database -> Restore

Once the database has been restored, it would just be a matter of regenerating the website again under:
Utilities -> Publish -> Regenerate

The process is just a few clicks, and can save you having to recreate information, re-upload etc… when a mistake is made.

LexiConn’s backup system is a multi-faceted approach. We start with high performance SCSI hard drives, which are the most reliable and durable drives that a server can utilize. We also run hardware RAID-1 on most shared servers, which means there are 2 identical SCSI drives that mirror each other, so that in the event one drive were to fail, the other drive continues to run wuthout any downtime or loss of data. All shared servers also have a SCSI backup drive for our backup procedures. We use SCSI backup drives, as the time to restore from a backup is much less when using SCSI hard drives.

Each night any files that have changed on the server in the past 24 hours are backed up. This allows us to keep a 7 day “rolling snapshot” of the server. Each week a full server wide backup is made. Additionally, we perform a remote backup of the entire server every two weeks to a separate datacenter in another part of the country as part of our disaster recovery plan. All of this helps us to insure as much data protection as possible for our clients.

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Creating perfectly sized popups

One of our hosted clients, Jeff at wilde-ideas.com, emailed us a very handy utility for creating perfectly sized popups that require very little work to use and maintain for any sized image or even text. The utility uses javascript to pre-determine the size of the popup, and then opens the popup window to that exact size. This is perfect for a link to a larger image, a link for a popup to explain shipping policies, definitions, etc…

We created a simple tutorial that explains this in more detail, which can be found at:
http://support.lexiconn.com/news/viewtopic.php?t=192

This utility removes the need to define the height and width of popups in the html code, which can be a real timesaver when dealing with a large number of differently sized images.

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Happy Holidays from LexiConn

We would like to wish all of you and your friends and family a happy, joyous holiday season, and a prosperous 2007! We sincerely appreciate that you have chosen LexiConn as your web hosting provider and ShopSite partner. We are excited for the coming year as we introduce more features and utilities that can help your ShopSite store grow and meet the needs of your customers.