We have fixed a problem of importing Microsoft Outlook Express contact book into Contact Manager.

Contact Manager allows you to import your Outlook Express contacts from a file saved in a CSV format – in this format contact details are separated by a delimiter character (comma, semicolon, tab, etc.). Following is the sample of a CSV file with comma-character field separator:

Outlook Express creates a CSV file from its contact book, which is recognized by Contact Manager during import operation; i.e. field names and delimiters are saved in the corresponding template:

Contact Manager was designed to recognize an Outlook Express CSV file where fields were separated by semicolon. Thus, if an imported CSV file contained comma, the operation would result in the error.

We have replaced semicolon by comma as the recognized delimiter, which supports import of CSV files created in current versions of Outlook Express.

If you still experience a problem with importing your Outlook Express book into Contact Manager, feel free to contact WebAsyst technical support. 

Total number of downloads of Shop-Script FREE shopping cart script exceeded 100000!

Shop-Script FREE is effective shopping cart solution for online merchants who sell relatively limited number of products (e.g. a couple of hundreds). You can download Shop-Script FREE and use it absolutely free.

Though many merchants who start with Shop-Script FREE switch to commercial Shop-Script PREMIUM or PRO packages when they start to earn money, we continuously receive requests from Shop-Script FREE users who compliment this product for being simple and friendly for both merchant and online store visitors.

There is a number of publication themes included in Quick Pages, which are used in publishing online books. Each publication theme defines “look and feel” of your published book; i.e. its color, font, and elements layout. You can publish every new book with a different theme, or choose one theme to represent your publishing trend and use it consistently.

When designing a book you can select one of the six predefined themes included in Quick Pages. They are listed on the Pages -> Publication Themes page:

• Beige & Blue
• Blue
• Canyon
• Jungle
• Olive
• Spartan

Each theme’s design is based on its formatting style. The name for a theme is given to reflect the combination of colors of its look and feel. The picture below shows three previews of “Quick Pages User Guide” published with themes “Canyon”, “Jungle”, and “Olive”:

Publication theme constructor
To create or modify a publication theme, you are not required to have knowledge of HTML, CSS, or script language. Quick Pages provides you with a theme constructor that creates a theme based on your choices of elements layout and format.

The picture below shows “Canyon” theme constructor. All the formatting elements are listed on the left of the constructor window; e.g. Book Header, Book Name, Search Panel, TOC Header, etc. Clicking on a formatting element will display its description and properties in the center of the window and a theme’s preview on the right. The preview is updated automatically every time you change a formatting property. The picture displays properties and Preview pane for Search Panel element:

Customizing an existing theme
You can customize any of the Search Panel available properties: select a different font, change its size and color, choose the background, etc. You can even take it out of the theme design if you do not intend to include search feature in your book. To take Search Panel out the theme, just turn off “Visible” checkbox. The theme preview will display ”Canyon” design without the search panel:

To customize any other formatting element, just click on the element name on the left and modify its properties. After you save it, your new “Canyon” theme will include all the modifications.

Creating a new theme
If you would like to design your own publication theme, Quick Pages offers you several starting options for a theme format:

• Tree – table of contents will appear on the left pane of a book. The tree format is most common in online book design. Most of the pre-designed Quick Pages themes are based on the tree format.
• Plain – table of contents will appear on top of the same page as the entire book. This is a good choice for a short book with table of contents that does not include many details. “Spartan” theme is based on the plain design. A book published with “Spartan” theme looks like the following:
• Copy from Theme – select a pre-designed theme to be a basis for your new theme.

After selecting the option and giving your new theme a name, you can specify the rest of the format properties in the “Customize Theme” window.

Now that your publication theme is ready, you can select it from the list on the publication properties page (Book -> Publishing Setup) and use it to publish your book. 

Starting today every WebAsyst hosted account subscriber can select a unique name that will be used to identify his/her account. The name will be used as a 3-rd level domain name and will allow you and other users to access your WebAsyst account by typing address of the form:

http://[YOUR_NAME].webasyst.net

[YOUR_NAME] in the address line is a meaningful and easy to remember unique identifier. It could be your personal name (e.g john), family name (e.g johnson) if you share an account family members, or your company name (e.g. mycompany) for your corporate account:

Creating a name during new account registration
The account name is selected during the registration process:

This will automatically create http://mycompany.webasyst.net. By typing this URL in the address line, an account user will be taken to the login page, where he/she can access the account by entering his/her username and password.

Creating a name for existing accounts
Current WebAsyst hosted account subscribers will be offered to select a name and create an address to access an account right after they login to WebAsyst. A name will not replace a database key, but will allow an existing user to log in to his/her account by typing corresponding address. If an account subscriber chooses to login using a pre-assigned database key, he/she can still do it in a standard login form accessed from WebAsyst main website.

Why use a name for your account?
You can create multiple accounts, each with a familiar, easy to remember name representing your personal area on the Web. Database key is not needed anymore. You are providing users and subscribers with a friendly access to your account. While a database key can be easily lost or forgotten, a web address with a meaningful name is less likely to forget: it can be added to your browser’s “Favorites” area and accessed instantly by friends and colleagues.

It is best to create the name for your account as soon as possible, because somebody else may reserve your name before you do. Don’t loose your chance to have an account with an easy to remember name of your choice!

In Document Depot you can upload and store all kinds of image files: photos, pictures, scanned versions of documents, etc.

For a convenient image file list display, Document Depot creates thumbnail for every uploaded image, a smaller version of its picture. Thumbnails are often used to organize photos in an album or large image files collections as they significantly simplify browsing. Document Depot gives you a choice of two ways to display thumbnails:

• Thumbnail List – listing where list item is a thumbnail and its description; i.e. annotation or notes in reference to the image:

  

• Thumbnail Tile – listing where list item is a thumbnail only (including its name and size):

  

In Document Depot thumbnails are created automatically for the following file types: JPEG, GIFF and PNG. Thumbnail creation is enabled in Document Depot by default. If you would like to turn off automatic thumbnail creation, it can be done in Document -> Service screen, by clicking on Thumbnail tab.

To view an image file in full size, just click on its name or an icon in the list. The new browser window will open up, where your file content will be displayed, if an application that supports file’s format is installed on your local computer.

In the past few months we were publishing posts in our blog addressing elements of Mail Master functionality (see posts: “Creating mailing lists and sending bulk emails”, “Personalizing bulk email campaign”). Email scheduling is another important feature of mail management, included in Mail Master. Email scheduling allows users to defer sending their mail by a period of time. When filling out standard “Send Message” form users can choose “Send Later” option instead of default one “Send Now”, and specify date in future and an hour of the day when their email should go out. Till that time the email stays in the user’s mailbox with “Pending” status; she can still modify, delete it, reschedule the sending date or send it using “Send Now” option. At the indicated date and time corresponding mail with “Pending” status will be send out to its recipient list.

Email scheduling practical uses
Email scheduling is used widely in practice. Often people choose to prepare their mail in advance to minimize workload and stay on schedule avoiding potential Internet connection problems. You can prepare a newsletter to your customers on a weekend and fill out “Send Message” form, indicating “Send Later” option with the date corresponding to the following Tuesday, 9 am. No more action is required from your part – the newsletter will be sent out at the predefined time:

If you prefer to have an early head start with your Holiday greetings, you can get them ready in weeks or even months preceding holiday season. Once you complete the text of the greeting and other fields of the “Send Message” form, indicate that the greeting should go out on 12/23/2007, 4 am. After that you don’t have to return to the “Holiday greetings” item on your list anymore – the server will do its job, and the letter will be sent out to its recipient list.

Sending mail to a large recipient list
There are situations when it is recommended to schedule a future date for your outgoing mail, rather than choosing “Send Now” option. “Send Now” forces your email to be sent immediately; i.e. in real time. At that time the user sees the page with the progress bar on it, notifying her that the server is currently sending the mail:

Only after the email has been successfully sent to every address on its recipient list, the progress bar page will close, and your message list will be displayed.

As the recipient list gets longer (over 100 addresses), email sending time increases as well, during which the progress bar window stays open, preventing a user to continue with her work. In some cases it could even result in a script timeout, halting the email sending process (if you are using Mail Master software installed on your server and the server settings define the session timeout period).

Selecting “Send Later” option for your message with large recipient list solves the problem. Just indicate the nearest hour when the message should be sent and return to your Mail Master main window immediately. At the predefined time the email will be sent out without interfering with your work.

Early this week we have received a request from one of our customers who drew our attention to the fact that websites working on PHP scripts are not indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo and others. He insisted on this because his online store (powered by Shop-Script shopping cart software) did not appear in Google search results.

Please be aware that this is mistake.

Search engines do index dynamic websites, and it does not matter which programming or modelling language this website works on: PHP, ASP, C, C#, simple HTML or whatever else. Search engines do not see the source code of your website scripts, but they read the scripts output, similar to regular website visitors (though search engine bots don’t recognize text on images, Flash content, etc.).

To make sure that search engines index Shop-Script based online stores’ pages, please take a look at the list of pages of Shop-Script online demos indexed by Google.

If you already have a website or online store, but not sure about your indexation, you may check whether it is indexed by Google or not by searching for following keyword on Google:

site:www.yourdomain.name

Example: site:www.shop-script.com

To get indexed you should have relevant websites linking to yours. If you do, just give it a time (by the way, that was the reason why our customer worried why his online store is not in Google yet).

I strongly suggest you to read Google guidelines for webmasters. These guidelines are must known for all website owners who are looking for getting exposure at search engines.

Filtering in Issue Tracker lets you display your issue list in different presentations, which meet specific conditions. This feature is useful for lists with many items that cover wide specter of issue types: issues created and assigned to different users at different times, ranging from one day to one year ago, in progress and complete issues, high and low priority issues, etc.

Issue Tracker includes list of predefined filters accessible right in the main Issue Tracker window. Among others are:

• Open Issues – all issues that are not yet completed
• Last Week – all issues, whether open or complete that were created last week
• Assigned to Me – open issues assigned to the currently logged in user
• I am Sender – open issues forwarded by the currently logged in user to others
• Pending 1 Week + - open issues that were not addressed for at least a week

When Jeff logs in to Issue Tracker and clicks “Assigned to Me” filter, the list of issues assigned to him will be displayed in the issue window for the selected project and a task.

Issue Tracker filter list is customizable: you can delete a filter, modify it to add or remove a filtering restriction, or create a new one and add it to the filter list.

Creating a new filter
Now Jeff wants to see all issues that were created by him within the past month, but were neither forwarded nor assigned to another user; i.e. “unaddressed” issues. There’s no “Unaddressed Issues” filter in the predefined issue list. No problem – Jeff can create his own filter in the matter of few clicks and display the issues that satisfy the criteria. This is how the page with the option fields for the new filter looks:

After indicating his choices for the filter (open issues created by Jeff that were created and not forwarded for 30 days) Jeff gives it a name “Unaddressed Issues” and saves it; the newly created filter will instantly appear in the filter list in Issue Tracker main window.

Modifying a filter
After Jeff had run his issue list thru the new “Unaddressed Issues”, the issue window displayed about 15 issues. The list is long and many items are not of interest to him, especially since he wants to see only issues pertaining to a particular project. Jeff needs to modify the “Unaddressed Issues” filter, restricting it even further by adding filtering criteria. All issue from the project contain the word ‘flyer’ in it, therefore Jeff types ‘flyer’ in the “Issue description contains the following text:” field, saves the filter parameters and runs his issue list thru the filter again. This time the issue window will display exactly the information he is looking for.