What the E!

At church we are in the process of changing our church website and newsletter system to better communicate with new/prospective attenders and along with regular attenders/members.

As part of this we are likely going to implement a PHPList based weekly email newsletter. As part of the planning process for this upgrade I started exploring templates for use in PHPList. I quickly found a bigger challenge than I expected. Check out the link below and take a look at the chart across different mail clients.

Guide to CSS support in email clients 2008 - Articles & Tips - Campaign Monitor.

The list is crazy look at all the client/operating system combinations. This is my first time down this path, but even testing is challenging. For web based html you have a relatively limited number of mainstream browser/OS combination. Normally, the testing can be isolated to 2 or 3 main browsers and just a couple of operating systems. Even then there are several services that allow you to see how your website renders in a large number of different combination’s; my favorite being Browser Shots.

If you see a service like browershots for email message templates or have suggestions of tools, tips, or services please let me know.

I post content to a couple of different websites and many times people provide the original content in a MS Word document. Nothing wrong with this, but it can be a little bit of a hassle to convert the Word document to html in a clean way.

You can’t paste the document directly into the WSYIWIG editor or you will get really funky formatting and MS Word HTML is what you might call “interestingly dysfunctional”. So normally I hand code the documents in notepad or UltraEdit. This works well, but can be very time consuming.

So after looking at a couple commercial services/software that claim to do the trick, I found this website word2cleanhtml.com. It does exactly what the title implies and does a pretty good job. You simply copy your word document onto the site and hit the convert to clean html button. You may need to clean up a few tags, but generally the code is clean, properly formatted, and ready to go. It can save you a few minutes and help keep your frustration down to a reasonable level!

Lots of times people need to capture screenshots.  Just pressing Print Screen on the keyboard and pasting into Word works when you just need to send a screenshot of an error message to your favorite computer nerd:)

There are a number of paid programs out there that work well, but most of dont need the features of many of the paid programs.  We just need to take a few screenshots a month to stick in a powerpoint or a training document.  Then PrintKey 2000 is the tool for you.  I have been using the tool for at least 5 years now.  It is a great tool that is one of few screen capture tools that works well with multiple monitors.

The software is old and if want a new version that looks a little better you can always send the developer some money via Print Key Pro

I follow and read a number of other blogs, but this recent article from A List Apart is really cool.  I do some web design, mostly as a volunteer for non profits.  Most of my testing (I wont use the word designing) is done by the make a change and view in a couple browsers method.

This article was a real eye opener for me in ways to effectively manage what style sheets different browsers actually see.

A List Apart: Articles: Progressive Enhancement with CSS

I have been wanting to take a number of our pictures and put them together as a nice slideshow for DVD.  This tool looks great and is easy to use, yet lets you do some really nice stuff that Windows Photo Story doesnt allow.

Check it out here DVDslideshowGUI