With all the hype that is surrounding the launch of the Apple iPad - the big question for website owners must be "Will my website work on the Apple iPad?".

If the iPad gets the same massive uptake by Apple fans and the public - there could be a lot people surfing the web using their iPads. If your site doesn't display properly on the iPad you could miss out on customers.

What is the screen resolution of the Apple iPad?

1024 x 768 is the current iPad screen resolution.

If you site was designed for widescreen monitors (6:9) you will need to check how your website looks in the old 1024x768 size (most old CRT monitors were this size). You can check by changing the your monitor display size and surf your own website to look for problems.

Does the Apple iPad support flash? 

No. Just like the iPhone and touch iPods flash does not run on the Apple iPad. Website designers will need to take this into consideration.

More things missing from the iPad

Do you have an Adobe Business Catalyst website with a lot of customers you wish to Opt-In ?

You can request Business Catalyst to set the master opt-in on your site, so all existing customers are "opt-in" to your marketing emails. [Forum thread here]

Send a support ticket to Business Catalyst to have them turn on the master opt-in option for your website and ask them to opt-in your entire database at the same time.

What is double opt-in ?

When a customer signs up to a newletter list on your website, Business Catalyst automatically sends the auto-responder to the customer. The tag {tag_verificationurl} in the auto-responder email is replaced with a link the customer clicks to confirm they want to receive your newsletters. This is known as double opt-in.

What if the customer does not click the verification link?

If the customer does not click the link, they will not be receive your newsletters unless you force opt in for their account in the admin panel, or have used the bypass double opt-in feature in your webforms, or have the master opt-in turned on by BC support.

What if I've turned off the auto-responder for a form?

If you've disabled the auto-responder on your form, the verification link will not be sent to your customers. In this case you will need to either:

• use the force opt-in feature on your webforms
• or ask BC to opt-in all your customers
• or opt-in your customers individually

Why does Business Catalyst use double opt-in?

Business Catalyst uses double opt-in to comply with anti-spam measures and legislation, but a lot of websites have a Newletter Signup form or similar where customers are expressly wanting to join in to your marketing list.

By default all newsletter forms are double opt-in and there are a few things you can do to skip this process.

How to: Force Opt-in on Newsletter Subscription Forms

To ensure your customers are going to receive your newsletters when they subscribe, you need to add the force opt-in parameter to your form.

1. Edit your newsletter forms and add &OPTIN=true to the end of the form action ( <form action="..."  )

All new subscribers will then be opted-in as soon as they subscribe to a newsletter using this form.
 

Additional references

Wiki page on force opt-in

Following on from Adobe Business Catalyst Adds FTP Access to Templates  - Business Catalyst now has access to all the custom layouts available via FTP.

You can access the layouts in the /Layouts folder via FTP.

You can now customise the layout via FTP for these modules:

• Affiliate
• Announcement
• Blog
• Booking
• Comments
• Customer Cases
• Customer Orders
• Faq
• Favourite
• Forum
• Literature
• Online Shop
• Outbound Emails
• Site Search
• System Messages
• Tell A Friend
• Webapps

(Screenshot from my FTP)

There's been many Business Catalyst customers looking to access their website templates via FTP.

Up until now the only way to edit your website templates was the admin panel (Admin -> Templates) or using Triangle (the Adobe Dreamweaver plugin).

As of today Business Catalyst has allowed access to edit and backup your templates via FTP.

To access you templates in FTP:

1. Connect to your Business Catalyst website via FTP
2. Browse to the /Templates folder

You can then download the .html file contents to create a backup, or edit the files on FTP.

Business Catalyst already includes a great reporting tool - but Google Analytics is still my prefered report engine. You can gain so much information about who and why people are visiting your business catalyst site - more importantly it can help you figure out why sales or contact forms are not being completed.

Eventually this page is going to hold all the tips I have about using Google Analytics with Business Catalyst, but for now I have one tip and that is how to add the analytics tracking code to your templates in a way that works with Business Catalyst and the Dreamweaver plugin Triangle.

Business Catalyst (BC) has a habit of decoding the tracking code and breaking it. (Those "%3C" you see in the google code are actually "<"  but they need to be encoded to work).

The problem comes in with this part of the tracker code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

Notice the unescape() call - this is what tells the browser to decrypt the %3C - BC should not touch this - but it does.

So the work around I have been using is:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write("<scr" + "ipt src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'></scr" + "ipt>");
</script>

Notice that I've pre-decoded the string, removed the call to unescape() and broken up the string.

The important part here is that you must break up the <script  tag into something like <scr" + "ipt  ... this stops the webbrowser from seeing the script tag until the javascript tells it to (with the document.write() ). If you skip this bit you google analytics code will still not work and you will probably get javascript errors on the page.

QSSUG Meeting This Thursday – 26th of November

Following on from Leo Pasta's lead, I've created two stored procedures to make printing out a message without waiting for a batch or transaction to completed. InstantPrint and InstantPrintTime

1. Start in the package Control Flow, with no object selected (Press ESC in the main window).
2. Right click the background in the package, and select Variables

   

3. Add a variable called LoopIteration with the Int32 data type in the package.
4. Add a For Loop Container to the package

   

5. Edit the For Loop Container by double-clicking it, or right-clicking it and choosing Edit.
6. Set the InitExpression to @[User::LoopIteration]=0
7. Set the EvalExpression to @[User::LoopIteration]<5 where 5 would is the number of loops you want to run.
8. Set the AssignExpression to @[User::LoopIteration]=@[User::LoopIteration]+1
9. Your settings should now look like this:

   

My team mate Pi asked me today: how do you create a byte with the value 00000001 in SQL Server?

The answer is to create an integer representation of the byte's value, and cast it to binary.

The output in Management Studio is: 0x01 (Management Studio outputs binary fields in Hex format). Hex 0x01 = Bits 0000001.