We’ve been notified about problems with posting to our forums that started late last week.

The source of the problems was incorrect mail server configuration that was somehow restored at our server. The problem should be fixed now.

Thanks to all who notified us about the issue!

As some of you have probably noticed, our site(s) weren’t functioning properly for about a week in mid April and some of you experienced problems taking advantage of our 50% discount promotion.

So, to compensate for the downtime we decided to extend the promotion for one more week. You can use the promotion code SPAWIS5 until May 7, 2008 and get 50% off any SPAW Editor purchase.

Links are available at our Purchase page

Update: hopefully the issues have been resolved

We are experiencing technical difficulties with our server handling solmetra.com/spaweditor.com website. The site will be restored as soon as we determine the cause of the problem and resolve it.

You can still download SPAW Editor files through sourceforge.net

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We will extend the 50% discount promotion to compensate for the downtime. For now you can purchase the commercial licenses by following these links:

• PHP Edition
• ASP.NET Edition

50% discount promotion code is “SPAWIS5″ (without quotes).

Hi there!

We’ve just launched our newest online service - Knotler.com. It’s an innovative approach to a hundred years old issue - personal shopping list management. We’ve employed AJAX to make creation of your shopping lists easy, fast and hassle-free. We’ve also made sure your lists are available through vast array of mobile devices and interfaces, including iGoogle, mobile phones, PDAs, even legacy WAP browsers. Why? Because writing on paper sucks!

Each list can be collectively edited by many persons simultaneously. Without any registrations, email, and all unnecessary BS. Yes yes - we’re aware that your wife can add those damn cosmetics for you to pick up on your way home while simultaneously removing your six-packs. We’re working on it

Give it a spin and let us know what you think. It’s free. And you know it’s cool because it has a BETA sign…

P.S. What the name Knotler means? No f***** idea.

A couple of days ago one new user in our forums started asking some questions. These questions were legitimate but he included huge banner for some Star Wars fansite or something (hope it wasn’t some trojan link) in his signature. I asked him not to use this signature but got no reply. He asked more questions, all legit and I replied to some of them. But he was asking them all over the place: in v.2 forum, in v.1 forum, in .NET forum. Well, I thought, maybe the guy is a huge SPAW fan and tries to use it everywhere

But today his post used a standard spam subject (like “enlarge your…”) but inside there was a legitimate question. After some thinking I tried searching for complete sentence from his post and voila - his posts were just copies of some random old posts combined with subjects from other posts (I think). The problem of the bot was that it most likely used a subject of a simplier old-school spam message and it gave him away. Otherwise I’d read and answer his questions for who knows how many more days? months? years?

Anyway while antispam technologies evolve spamming technologies evolve too and normal people waste more and more time on spam. Like I do writing this and you reading

Our friend at amCharts.com has just released his second chart control in his collection of the beautiful eye-candy flash charts: Line & Area Chart

You can use these charts in conjunction with any server-side technology. You just have to output the values in XML or CSV formats. And best of all you can use fully functional version of the beauty absolutely free of charge (if you don’t mind a small link back to amCharts.com).

In addition to Line & Area Chart there’s also a Pie & Donut Chart which is as beautiful and as versatile as this one.

You can also help spread the word about amCharts by posting a link on your site, blog or forum and by digging this post on Digg.com

Now you can embed YouTube movie into your content by just pasting the URL into the dialog of the new YouTube plugin for SPAW Editor PHP Edition v.2.

As usual you can download the plugin from our plugin page.

There’s a rumor that Apple might be releasing Safari browser on Winows. Well, as a user I don’t really care much about it, but as SPAW’s developer I hope this could save us some money (we only evaluate an option to purchase Mac to make SPAW Editor work under Safari).

It seems to be a rule that I am damned by constant crazy ideas popping into my head. Most of the time those are of the “white noise” category. However, some occasional idea triggers a spontaneous — as I call it — “3 hour challenge”, or “let’s see if I can do develop this interesting concept application in just 3 hours.”

It’s also a rule, that “3 hour challenges” almost always result in several days of actual work. Like it was with my latest experiment in AJAX - Image Search Slideshow. It’s a very basic idea - run a search against Google Image Search and display full result images as a slideshow. Basic functionality took 3 hours. Additional bells and whistles — navigation, optimization, Yahoo and live.com support — took another 30.

So here comes the ultimate image search engine for those special occasions when your hands absolutely positively have something better to do than keyclicking

http://slideshow.zmpgroup.com/

Oh and by the way, I honestly don’t recommend running a search for “playmate” on Google Images. And since you’re not gonna listen to me anyway, here comes “I warned you” in advance: I warned you!

I came to work on Friday eager to further develop SPAW v.2 but found my PC “hanging”. In a couple of seconds it started working but veeerrryyy slowly. I started full scale investigation of the reasons of such cruel behavior just to find that my hard drive is dying. There were a couple of bad blocks and the number was growing. So I forgot about new work and started saving old (actually everything really important was secure in different locations but I still had to save some semi-important stuff).

I also found out that warranty for the HDD expired a couple of months ago but found a spare (though smaller) drive in our old unused server. When I was formatting that drive it appeared that it has some bad blocks too. But these seemed to be steady so I proceeded. When Windows was installed it refused to activate via Internet saying that my key was already used too many times and I should proceed over the phone. I had to dictate something like 20-30 digits to the Microsoft lady and she had approximately the same amount for me.

Btw, situation with my old drive stabilized. So, now I have 2 wounded drives in my computer and am actually sitting on a time bomb.

At least there was this message in system event log that gives a little hope