The most important thing to consider when adding one is its purpose. Surrey County Council Lib Dems, for example, have used their image slider to show you their Councillors. Andrew Stunell MP, however, has used his image slider to underline his local credentials. Having a clear purpose for any content on your site is vital. This is certainly true with an image slider.

The second thing to consider is space. By default Foci2 sites resize according to the screen size they are viewed on. Adding an image slider could mean risking the loss of some of your content from the edge of the site wrapper on smaller screens. To prevent this, and reduce white space, you can fix the width of your site using the Additional CSS box under Setup > Configuration. See below for an example of fixing the width to 980px using this box:

#wrapper {width: 980px;}

#footer {width: 980px;}

The final things to consider are aspect ratio and size. To get maximum effect from an image slider it helps to have a set of images that have the same ratio of width to height. This will prevent you from having unintended white space. It also helps if the smallest image is at least as large as the width and height of your image slider. No image can be displayed by Foci2 in a size larger than the original uploaded image. I personally recommend using large images that you can crop later if need be.

The first stage of adding your image slider is to open your chosen page in the admin area. This may well be the home page, which can be accessed by clicking Home Page under Setup > Templates. When you have opened your page you will see the Foci2 content editor. Firstly, select the location where you would like your image slider to appear. You can then begin adding the slider by clicking on the dropdown menu at the top right of the editor and selecting Multiple image slider.

This will open a window which looks similar to the standard image window, with some differences. Firstly, you will need to select at least two images to add the slider. Secondly, you can drag and drop individual images to re-order them. Thirdly, the editor won't automatically fill in a default width and height. When you insert a width or height the editor will match these to the aspect ratio of the images. Clicking insert and then the save button will add the image slider into your page.

This will give you a basic, but somewhat limited, image slider. Within the image slider window there is quite a bit more that you can do. If you click on one of your chosen images at the top of the window, for example, you can add a caption to the image and you can also link it to a page on your site or elsewhere on the web. You can also remove images that you decide are no longer fit for purpose. Clicking the dropdown menu item next to transition effects allows you to decide how the slides change over and you can even set how long this takes using the adjacent input box. You could also set your slider to float on the left or right of the page with content wrapped around it.

What you do with your slider will depend a lot on its intended purpose. There are some great examples of image sliders used for specific purposes on Foci2 websites, such as Islington Lib Dems, Shepway Lib Dems, Catherine Bearder MEP and the Bournemouth Lib Dems. If you have any queries at all about adding or editing image sliders in Foci2, then please do contact us. The only thing we can't do is take the photos for you!

Firstly, if you had elections on May 2nd we really hope you got the result you deserved. The results were better than the last two years, and although the Party did make losses (including my Folkestone West County seat - I'll be back!) the tide is clearly on the turn, and it's due to the work of every Lib Dem activist.

Next: a few Foci2 updates!

Making the Most of Your Site Design

A number of our sites have been working with us recently to use the ability to change the design of their site to make them more attractive. Some examples include the sites of Andrew Stunell MP and Mark Hunter MP - we think they are looking good!

Anything you see on those sites can be done on YOUR Foci2 site as well: a good starting point is to make sure you have a really good photo or two - they really do speak 1,000 words. We're here to help you with making your site look sharper too: contact Gary at gary@praterraines.co.uk to discuss your site, especially if you have a few good photos (of your area, key campaigners with people, good action shots) that could be used. If you haven't got those photos, we're told the light in late May is particularly good to take some!

Email Headers and other enhancements in the last month

A subtle change, but useful and suggested to us by Stephen Robinson of Chelmsford - thanks Stephen! In many email readers like Google, we have improved the summary display of your emails to include the first line of content as well as the site name.

This display change is increasingly widely used but needed a small change to the underlying code of the emails we sent out. With the new email format we introduced a couple of months ago and this change as well, we think we're developing one of the strongest email tools for Lib Dems, and have more improvements in the pipeline to improve it still further: watch this space...

We've also enhanced our Twitter integration to ensure Twitter updates for embargoed stories are no longer sent if the story has been deleted, and changed the wording on your un-subscribe page to reduce accidental opt-outs from all email when users only want to stop digests. Both these changes have also been made in response to user requests: please keep them coming!

All our Foci2 enhancements are announced as we bring them live on Twitter at www.twitter.com/praterraines - if you would like to be kept in touch with updates as they happen please give us a follow!

Using an Image Slider on your site

Our Customer Support Manager Gary has been spending a lot of time lately working with users to put snazzy new image sliders on their sites. It's easy to do and creates a big impact: have a read of Gary's advice on image sliders and how to use them effectively.

Any Questions?

We offer email and phone support working days from 9am-5pm. Our Customer Support Manager Gary Fuller is ready to offer any assistance he can, whether talking through or helping with any of the above, or help in anther way such as giving your site a new look.

Call Gary during office hours on 0845 363 7163 or email gary@praterraines.co.uk - he's waiting to hear from you!

Until the next time!

Catherine Bearder

Bournemouth Lib Dems

Islington Lib Dems

Shepway Lib Dems

Andrew Stunell

visually appealing and can also be used as a way of getting key campaigning messages across. The most important thing to consider when adding one is its purpose. Surrey County Council Lib Dems, for example, have used their image slider to show you their Councillors. Andrew Stunell MP, however, has used his image slider to underline his local credentials. Having a clear purpose for any content on your site is vital. This is certainly true with an image slider.

The second thing to consider is space. By default Foci2 sites resize according to the screen size they are viewed on. Adding an image slider could mean risking the loss of some of your content from the edge of the site wrapper on smaller screens. To prevent this, and reduce white space, you can fix the width of your site using the Additional CSS box under Setup > Configuration. See below for an example of fixing the width to 980px using this box:

#wrapper {width: 980px;}

#footer {width: 980px;}

The final things to consider are aspect ratio and size. To get maximum effect from an image slider it helps to have a set of images that have the same ratio of width to height. This will prevent you from having unintended white space. It also helps if the smallest image is at least as large as the width and height of your image slider. No image can be displayed by Foci2 in a size larger than the original uploaded image. I personally recommend using large images that you can crop later if need be.

The first stage of adding your image slider is to open your chosen page in the admin area. This may well be the home page, which can be accessed by clicking Home Page under Setup > Templates. When you have opened your page you will see the Foci2 content editor. Firstly, select the location where you would like your image slider to appear. You can then begin adding the slider by clicking on the dropdown menu at the top right of the editor and selecting Multiple image slider.

This will open a window which looks similar to the standard image window, with some differences. Firstly, you will need to select at least two images to add the slider. Secondly, you can drag and drop individual images to re-order them. Thirdly, the editor won't automatically fill in a default width and height. When you insert a width or height the editor will match these to the aspect ratio of the images. Clicking insert and then the save button will add the image slider into your page.

This will give you a basic, but somewhat limited, image slider. Within the image slider window there is quite a bit more that you can do. If you click on one of your chosen images at the top of the window, for example, you can add a caption to the image and you can also link it to a page on your site or elsewhere on the web. You can also remove images that you decide are no longer fit for purpose. Clicking the dropdown menu item next to transition effects allows you to decide how the slides change over and you can even set how long this takes using the adjacent input box. You could also set your slider to float on the left or right of the page with content wrapped around it.

What you do with your slider will depend a lot on its intended purpose. There are some great examples of image sliders used for specific purposes on Foci2 sites by Islington Lib Dems, Shepway Lib Dems, Catherine Bearder MEP and the Bournemouth Lib Dems. If you have any queries at all about adding or editing image sliders in Foci2, then please do contact me. The only thing we can't do is take the photos for you!

Firstly, we hope you had a good Easter break, and want to wish all of our users facing elections this May the very best of luck.

We know you are busy right now, so just wanted to mention a few recent updates to your website that we've introduced:

Improved email formatting

If you have sent emails to site users from your management area, or indeed received an email digest from your site in the last few days, hopefully you'll have noticed they've had rather a facelift!

We've done some formatting and development work to make them more branded and attractive in a wide range of email browsers. We've also added the ability to include photos in your emails now - all rather more eye-catching!

We hope you like the new formatting, and that it encourages recipients to read them and respond!

Keeping in Touch with Members and Supporters

Along with the above improvement in how emails from the site look, we've also made getting user data into your site much easier than before.

Under Interaction > Users in the main site management menu, there is now the option to "Import from CSV". This allows you to import new site users from a file of users - allowing you to import / set up new users on your site so that you can keep in touch with them with email digests and emails straight from the management area of your website.

The import from CSV facility has been developed to work really simply for .csv files downloaded from the Party's Membership Database Online system (and hopefully *quite* simply for other files as well!) and will try where possible to update existing users whose details have changed rather than adding a duplicate entry. It's another example of where our system is specifcally configured to support Lib Dem campaigning - as we are Lib Dem campaigners too, we work with the same systems you do!

Any Questions?

We offer email and phone support working days from 9am-5pm. Our Customer Support Manager Gary Fuller is ready to offer any assistance he can, whether talking through or helping with any of the above, or help in anther way such as giving your site a new look.

Call Gary during office hours on 0845 363 7163 or email gary@praterraines.co.uk - he's waiting to hear from you!

Until the next time!

Firstly, many thanks for all those who came to see us a Federal Conference last weekend in Brighton. We had a good weekend, and had the opportunity to demonstrate our snazzy new image slider component to a lot of administrators: it looks like it'll be a really well used feature!

Snazzy New Image Slider

As a few examples, you can see it in place at www.islington-libdems.org.uk and www.welshlibdems.org.uk (and www.shepwaylibdems.org.uk but warning: features picture of Tim!) and it's now completely configurable by site managers - using the "Multiple Image Slider" component on any page or article.

It looks best if you use pictures of the same aspect ratio (shape) and you can make each image a "click through" to another page or site, and add captions to each image, as well as a wide range of transition styles, allowing you to be creative!

Introducing Gary: Customer Support Manager and Designer

Our new Customer Support Manager Gary Fuller was on our stand at Federal Conference, helping people get the most out of their site and showing off some of the new designs he has working on with different sites.

Gary is no new face to the Lib Dems - he has been a town and parish Councillor for the party since 2007 and a key campaigner in Sandgate where Prater Raines are based.

Gary is working with us to support our users in getting the most of out of their sites and use the design flexibility we can offer to re-design sites to look the way you want. Recent examples include www.bearder.eu, www.dundeelibdems.org.uk and www.islington-libdems.org.uk but if you have other ideas, tell Gary: he's here to help!

Call Gary during office hours on 0845 363 7163 or email gary@praterraines.co.uk - he's waiting to hear from you!

Recent Enhancements

Thanks to feedback from users, we brought live a number of small fixes and enhancements to Foci2 over the conference weekend. There include:

• improving the way email digests report forthcoming events
• changing the default display of images in the image section to a grid rather than list layout
• improving surveys so when they are set-up, you can now set whether it should be possible to complete them anonymously or require contact details.

All these enhancements (and the image slider) are as a direct result of user requests and feedback: thank you!

We aim to send these updates much more regularly over coming months. In the next edition, we will update you on some more site enhancements including:

• CSV imports of user data
• adding images to emails

...and good use of the image slider and Lifestream components!

Until the next time!

Alliance and David have been clients of Prater Raines for many years. Both sites have undergone a number of refreshes in that time, but have now been moved to a common CMS which will offer opportunities to share content between the sites.

The new design has reflects Alliance's new "For Everyone" blueprint.

Prater Raines' Gary Fuller led the redesign for the Alliance and David Ford's site. He says:

The intention of the redesign was to encourage more user interaction with the site. We wanted to draw the content to the fore and simplify the site navigation.

To achieve this we've worked to change the layount to draw users eye-line towards the content rather than the header of the site. We've also modernised the look of the site, put into place some prominent links to key activities and hopefully made the front page much more eye-catching.

Over the years we've noticed a steady increase in the number of web requests we get from automated "bots" attempting to exploit our systems to send spam, spread malware, or get access to data they shouldn't have.

Most often this manifests as repeated attempts to fill out our "send us your views" forms, attempts to sign in to Wordpress or Drupal using common administrator usernames and passwords, and attempts to use known exploits in old versions of software to hack into our systems.

Why we wanted to do something about them

All of this isn't really much more than an annoyance. We block automated postings on forms using a combination of blacklisting known spammer IP addresses and filtering messages which look like spam. We check the passwords our administrator users choose and block any that look insufficiently secure. We don't run Wordpress and our one Drupal installation runs on its own server equipment. We already keep our server software and third party libraries up to date.

But it can slow down our websites. In particular we've noticed our admin system becoming very slow to use when there are lots of simultaneous posts to the views form or when the server is being aggressively scanned. It doesn't help this situation that some of our sites have rather complicated code for handling requests to addresses which don't exist.

In the past our response has simply been to add the offending IP addresses to the blacklist in our firewall when we notice a problem. While this alleviates the current problem it isn't very effective at preventing future issues and it's hit-and-miss whether we notice at all.

Our new approach

On Friday we took a different approach to the problem and installed the modsecurity "Web Application Firewall". This plug-in for our webserver allows us to create rules which trap these automated requests and block them before they reach our application software and slow down our system. We've installed the Core Rule Set provided by the Open Web Application Security Project and adapted the base rules for our own requirements - for example to block requests for software we don't run like Wordpress or ASP.

There's a minor exception to this last rule because our first ever website, Bedford Liberal Democrats, used to run on ASP back in 2002. It's our policy that when we publish an address on one of our sites it should work forever, as long as we still host the site. So a small handful of ASP addresses, like http://bedfordlibdems.org.uk/localhelp.asp, are still permitted through the firewall.

The results so far

Since installing the firewall on Friday afternoon it's stopped more than 10,000 requests hitting our systems, including 500 postings to "send us your views" and 400 login attempts. A striking 3,500 requests were for non-existent ASP.NET pages even though our server doesn't run Windows, let alone ASP.

We're honing the system and hope to trap more requests in future, but even if this rate continues that'll equate to over 100,000 requests a month we're not having to deal with. There's a slight overhead involved with running the software at all but it looks like this will be more than balanced out by the reduction in slowdowns when we get many posts at once.

There have been a handful of cases where we've trapped a request we shouldn't have, and a few of our administrator users may have noticed "403 Forbidden" pages when you tried to publish certain changes to your websites. We're tracking these ourselves and fixing problems as they come to light, but you can always help out by letting us know if you get a forbidden response, especially if it's on your user-facing website.

A picture. Thus this article is more likely to be believed. Oddly.

Research from New Zealand (reviewed on Lib Dem Voice) makes it clear how adding a photo to an article of page seems to make it more trustworthy just in itself. It doesn't even matter what the picture is of - its simple presence makes a difference.

We've being saying for years that adding images to articles and pages add interest and attract more people to read the story. We'll now add "and more likely for it to be believed" to our list of reasons to do so.

As it has not been affecting all users, and those seeing problems are not seeing the same issue consistently, it has been difficult to diagnose what is causing this, but we are working on it. We have put some specific error logging in place to monitor all log-out occurances, and have now been able to reproduce the error in Prater Raines Towers for the first time, which is a big help in diagnosing the problem!

We suspect that this may be related to an issue also causing some images not to load in the pop-up image library in the back-end: this is also being worked on. More when we have it...

Update at 1pm on 26 June

The issue has now been diagnosed and both problems are fixed.

Since 15:58 today the London Internet Exchange has been experiencing widescale issues resulting in large numbers of ISPs disconnecting from both the Juniper and Extreme LANs which LINX operate. We disconnected immediately the issues started but are still seeing severe disruption to many endpoints within the UK as the issues are causing other providers to experience routing loops and losses on their networks. Global BGP routing will also require some time to stabilise after this large number of disconnects / re-routes.

We are monitoring the situation closely and will take further action where appropriate. For now please be aware that disruption is likely.

An issue of that scale could effect pretty much any ISP hosting a website or indeed connecting you to the Internet. It's likely to be intermittent, and to take a while to resolve itself.

If any Prater Raines customer has an issue updating or viewing their site at the moment, the above may be the reason. Please feel free to get in touch to let us know directly if this is the case (or especially if there are issues other than connecting to the site), but until "widescale issues" resolve themselves, it is likely to be that issue.

Any of our clients trying to pay us via our online card payment system on Friday were unable to do so until around 3pm due to a technical problem with our payment processing provider. We're pleased to say this was resolved by around 3pm, and the system should now be working normally.

If you were attempting to pay on Friday by debit / credit card and failed, please do retry now or call us on 0845 363 7163 and we will be more than happy to help.

This leads though to the apology Prater Raines received from that Payment Services Provider - Realex Payments - this morning. It said:

As you know Realex Payments experienced a severe service outage on Friday last week between 8.58am and 3.04pm. As noted in our last status update, Friday was the worst day in our history. We want to emphasise and again apologise to all our clients for this unacceptable and most disruptive outage. For all of our clients - large and small, domestic and international - to lose payment processing is simply not an option. We are undergoing a detailed review of what occurred and we will implement all the changes and actions necessary to ensure that this cannot happen again.

Our support teams and corporate account managers are all on standby and more than happy to meet and engage with any businesses or partners who would like to review this in more detail. Once again, we apologise and we assure you of our 100% commitment to taking the corrective action.

Gary Conroy, Chief Operating Officer, Realex Payments

We're impressed with that.

Something went wrong. They held their hands up, said sorry (and said it from the top, rather than the bottom of the company), understand how important it could have been, are working to ensure it can never happen again, and have offered any personal support required to its clients.

Kudos to Realex for getting the apology right.

All of these web applications have been transferred from the existing supplier with care and attention. We've managed the domain name and hosting transfers and limited downtime in each case to just a matter of minutes, throughout which time the sites remained online but editing and signing in was restricted. We've been able to keep all the clients on similar terms and conditions and at the same price they had been paying their previous supplier.