We found out that GIFs weren’t working for a lot of people, and PNGs for a lot of others. We hacked together a fix, so now things should be working better with background images of all types.

Nothing has changed here, but we realized we were having some issues, so we’re going to disclose them here.

• PNG images with dimensions that multiply to be greater than ~4,400 will likely result in a blank white page. This is because of a memory limit and the way our library handles PNG images. For better luck, resize them or convert them to JPEGs before uploading.
• JPEG images with the (albeit more correct) JFIF header make the core JPEG library we use go bonkers, so they are no longer accepted. You should get a message that hints at that.
• BMP images are not supported. They never really were, apparently. We remember them working, but according to our library they never were. Strange, but true, I think. It’s all hearsay really.

Just while we’re coming clean here…

• Our VIP interface and sign up page are ugly. We’re working on them now. You should see an updated VIP interface within about a weeks time.
• We are going to ditch the sliders for positioning text in favor of a drag and drop interface. It’ll require quite a bit of programming craftiness, though, so don’t expect it within an unreasonably short time frame (like 3 seconds, or 4 days).
• Until the above goes into effect we’re going to replace all the sliders on the site with a new one that is prettier. It will make pages load up to 50x faster on slow computers, and at least about twice as fast on bad ass gaming rigs. Very nice.
• We have plans for improving the text controls that should be launching within a week or two. Vaguely, we’re going to replace the dropdowns with input boxes. When you click in the input box you can type a number, or you can grab and drag the slider that will pop up right above it. This gives the best of both worlds between speed and precision, we think.
• Sometime soon (2-3 weeks) we’re going to start allowing you to email a banner to yourself (or a friend) or download it directly to your computer. We might even add support for uploading it automatically to your Myspace or Photobucket for hosting (which allows YOU to delete it whenever you want!).
• We will be adding VIP-only fonts in the future. This will be the first feature that we could give everybody but are only giving to VIP members. I don’t really like it, but the site needs income to run, and VIP accounts generate income.
• Oh, and come the end of the month we’ll be switching over to a more powerful server. Hopefully there isn’t any downtime.

Enjoy!