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!

I am currently hosting/working on a couple of drupal sites. Most of them at best get 100 visitor a day.  Nice traffic for the size of organization that they are supporting, but not anything to be concerned about even with the most basic cache features turned on.

However, my friend band is releasing a new CD.  Expect a fair amout of traffic, I found this article to be very helpful as a way to at least know what my options are if we ever really need to scale.

Drupal Performance and Scalability it is on Scribd so you either have to read it in the “ipaper” or download the PDF.