Posts Tagged ‘HTML’
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
It has been a fun few weeks! Last week I went to see Velvet Revolver, the super group made up of members from Stone Temple Pilots, Guns ‘n’ Roses and Wasted Youth, and afterwards in the private bar met Slash and Scott Weiland. Both seemed bloody nice chaps, although Weiland appeared to be the only person in the UK allowed to smoke indoors at the gig. Now that’s power.
I was extremely disappointed that while writing this I found that Velvet Revolver have parted company with Scott Weiland, Slash citing his “increasingly erratic behaviour” as the reason! Well I never!
Slash was a bloody nice chap too. And my f**king God was he good on guitar! Unbelievable in fact.
The Friday after the gig was my first sponsorship deadline, which I just about reached, with the rest on its way. Great news – I am definitely cycling to Amsterdam and Brussels in June then!! Hoorah! Speaking of which I did my first training ride on Saturday – only 20 miles, but it’s a start. This weekend I will do 40 miles and then the following weekend I will try all the way to Deal to see mother and Grandad!
The final update is possibly the best bit – for me anyway. Up there with meeting Slash! I was in .net magazine! Now it was only readers sites, but the site Griff designed for www.challengebee.org, that I built over a couple of nights a few months ago is one of the sites featured on page 18. Nice screen shot, blurb that I wrote and picture of me and the Griff. I am proud! Next up is writing a decent article for the mag, which I am sure I could do!! I’ll scan and upload to this post asap! Probably tomorrow!
No Comments
Category 3 Capitals in 3 Days Cycle Challenge, Computing, Music, Web | Tags: Tags: .net, Charity, gigs, HTML, slash, Velvet Revolver, Web,
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
So just after receiving an email asking why a complicated HTML email didn’t work in Outlook 2007 and explaining that since it uses Word to render HTML it was never going to display everything right. Obviously some people just don’t understand this.
However with almost perfect timing I got an email from xBox Live (Microsoft run) with the disclaimer above shown right at the top! Yes, Microsoft themselves are suggesting you read the HTML email in a browser rather than their own email client!
“Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007″
Now I accept that Microsoft may be correct in that HTML should not have been used for emails at all, emails should be plain text, end of. However if you are then going to support HTML partially, whilst using HTML emails in your own marketing, with a disclaimer against your own product, something is very wrong somewhere! Anyway, all the clients I work for won’t pay for plain text emails, therefore HTML emails kind of keep me in a job!
Anyway, I found this amusing, hope you do too.
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Hello magazine. That is the reason I have just felt a moment of pride for where I work and what I do. Yes I enjoy doing my work, love where I work and when the two combine and a website where I did all the front end and had some influence in the functionality and design (Griff, as normal, was awesome) is a great feeling. Although it would have been nice if it hadn’t taken me getting all the way back to Durham to mention possibly being in Hello magazine, only to find out my mother has a copy with a Gyro ad in it, and I didn’t even know for sure we were in! It was Hello for God’s sake. I have had emails saying we are on fecking petrol pump, so tell us properly when my work shall be in one of the best sellers!! Apart from that rant I am quite proud that a website I built the front end for has been featured in Hello magazine (even without sign off, eh Barnaby!!). I also asked for 4 weeks, not the 2 and a bit I got (with luck) so well done me on getting the job done anyway, God knows I don’t have time to go back and improve it! Unfortunately.
Other news includes that CodeIgnitor is awesome, still. TotSocks are gonna be big, hopefully.
Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson are my heroes and I wish I could be either of them!!
I have also found that Hot Shots: Part Deux has ruined any possible chance of me enjoying either Rambo 2 or 3 without giggling at the slightest hint of a Charlie Sheen joke. Or any other joke in that film, to be fair!!
And finally, in the top of Division 3 (Hackney and Leyton league) clash, Hospital Tavern (my current team) overcame the favourites for the league Highstone FC in a 3-2 victory. What a great result, and it must mean that we can go on to challenge for both the league and the last remaining cup. Although if being picked up on one error in that game means I get dropped for the quarter final cup game, I will be so disappointed, I’m not sure I could handle it!! Here’s to the slim chance of us winning the league!!
Friday, October 12th, 2007
Lately work we have had to build numerous email newsletters (e-zines, and sometimes even “eFlyers”?!) with a huge amount of content and very image heavy. The number and frequency of these emails mean a challenging turnaround time and the use of templates of previous email wherever possible.
However the client dropped a massive bomb shell when it was revealed that they (as a large corporate company) use Lotus Notes 5 as their primary email client. This is bad.
Not only does this mean we have to output a huge amount of work but it also means that this work must be absolutely indestructible, unbreakable code.
If you look at the following examples of emails displayed between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, you can see how perfectly valid and working emails can be slaughtered left, right and center by the Lotus Notes HTML rendering engine.
Sony email which uses styles quite heavily. While this means that the email will not display as designed in email clients that do not support CSS (Gmail, Notes amongst others) at least it will degrade gracefully.
This Hugo Boss email doesn’t use any style for any layout or formatting byut still breaks quite badly.
My preferred method would be that of Sony, or even plain text emails – which a recent .net podcast (episode 19) said most people surveyed would prefer to receive. Unfortunately the limited technical experience of marketing staff that have to sign off these emails mean that we have to make the emails work in Notes if possible, even if the actual recipients receiving the email in Notes is minimal.
There are a number of methods that can be used to make sure you emails display as planned in Lotus Notes and hopefully the trials and tribulations I have endured for the past year can be kept to a minimum for others by following these rules.
-
NO BACKGROUND IMAGES
They just don’t work. This doesn’t just apply to Notes, but also includes other well know email clients. This should be a general rule for all HTML email builds.
-
ALWAYS SET OUT TABLE COLUMNS FIRST
No matter whether widths are set on the
|
tags themselves, it has always helped me to have an empty row right at the start of every single table, with 1px in height spacer images defining the table cell widths.
-
NEVER EVER USE ROWSPAN
Now I don’t know why this doesn’t work, but it proved to be a thorn in my design for a long time. I find that the only way to guarantee the reliable display or a table exactly as it should be is to ignore that rowspan even exists and insert tds in every row wherever required.
-
DON’T SPLIT IMAGES HORIZONTALLY
If you have a wide image, don’t split it across a row. This often results in extra space for no apparent reason, stretching the table row containing the images. Even if you have distinctly separate images, if you can get away with just using one full row width image then do it. And fight to keep it that way.
If you absolutely have to split images horizontally, each must be in its own table cell, because even with absolutely no whitespace in the code, Lotus adds a single character space between each image.
-
USE NO STYLES
In my emails, I usually set text size at 11px or 12px using a style in my font tags to get around a link and copy size bug in hotmail. However Lotus Notes ignores this, and ALL other styles. So use no margins, padding font declarations, in fact use no styles at all. Go back to the early 90s, when CSS didn’t even exist!
Since I still like to make sure the link and surrounding copy are the same size in hotmail, I still define font size, however use 13px with a size="2" back up in the font tag (or 10px and size="1").
-
DO NOT USE P TAGS
Lotus Notes doesn’t recognise the margins that should apply between p tags, so I find that declaring a font tag then using spacers to separate copy blocks, as follows:
<font face="arial, verdana, sans-serif" size="2" color="#333333" style="font-size: 13px;">
Copy paragraph 1.
<br /><img src="../images/1x1spacer.gif" width="1" height="15" alt="" />
Copy paragraph 2, and so on throughout.
<br /><img src="../images/1x1spacer.gif" width="1" height="15" alt="" />
</font>
I’m sure there are more techniques and ways to make HTML emails work in all email clients, but I find that the above guidelines help me work more efficiently by decreasing the time spent on fixing Lotus Notes issues (especially when Notes development is a requirement), in fact most are so reliable that I have also started using the above rules in all emails. You never know, they might help when it comes to developing emails for Microsoft Outlook 2007, when Word is used for parsing HTML emails.
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
The Job I really wanted at GYRO. Fantastic News for me! Also saved me the hassle of temping and doing stuff that I didn”t really want to just to pay the rent. But now that this has come along then I can get on with learning proper web dev and become the best! Hoorah!!