24 Jun 2009
As per a posting I made to the WSG list earlier this afternoon:
We have a problem! Outlook 2010, according to Campaign Monitor, is going to continue to use the crippled MS Word layout engine. They adopted this as the status quo for Outlook 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a number of years, and are showing no great sign of diverging from this path. However, there is hope! Campaign Monitor have started a website in conjunction with their “Email Standards Project” — essentially a standards advocacy website. They need your support now more than ever.
FixOutlook.org aims to collate the community’s discontent with this decision using Twitter to change Microsoft’s policy decision on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of inferior email authoring!
If you’re a Twitter user, it’ll take two seconds to retweet and show your support.
Thanks!
Josh
This is a really important issue for anyone involved in email marketing, and well worth taking the effort to make some noise about. Essentially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is possible to drop support for these inferior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be dealing with sub-par mailing authoring, cross-compatibility, and display issues for a while to come.
Get tweeting! :)
22 Jun 2009
I stumbled across this document, Two Old English Elegies from the Exeter Book: The Wanderer and The Ruin (PDF) when hunting for a public-domain English translation of another Old English poem, Vainglory. The author of the linked document has also translated this, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it made the cut for any of his courses published online.
For reference, there is a translation of the poem, it’s just not the one I was looking for. R.M.Liuzza’s Beowulf: a new verse translation (2000) has a pretty mammoth series of appendices including a translation of Vainglory on page 209-211.
19 Jun 2009
I just finished adding tags to each of the 1200+ posts on this blog. Needless to say, I enlisted help.
Calais Archive Tagger, a free WordPress plugin, did most of the heavy lifting for me. It connects to a web service called OpenCalais, run by ThomsonReuters (so nothing dodgy is going on with your data, they’re a pretty big publishing conglomerate!) The biggest problem with it is that, given the particular emphasis of OpenCalais towards establishing commonalities between different data sets, it paid a disproportionate amount of attention to proper nouns, and when product names were incomplete (for example, my old Pentax SP500 camera that I often just referred to as “SP500″) it would match tags to other products that had a more complete title. Which would be excellent if that were, in fact, what I was talking about.
I ended up sifting through the maybe 2500+ tags it created and deleting about 400 of those, and consolidating others.
I’m nowhere near HAPPY with the tags as representative of the content of each post, but, from the ones I’ve scanned, it’s most definitely better than nothing at all. Clearly categories are decreasingly relevant as stronger search capabilities have emerged over the past couple of years, so tags are a great way of enhancing searchable content — it’s not just about relating similar information, it’s about creating a mesh or network of content. This has SEO benefits, but can also function as a barometer of the type and nature of content being discussed. For the record, I don’t think it’s a fantastic barometer for this blog just yet!
One other unexpected thing it did was expose some spam that had found its way into a handful of posts through old WordPress vulnerabilities (I presume pre-2.8 era)… there were only three, with probably negligible Page Rank effects for anyone.
18 Jun 2009
Adobe Fireworks is a pretty brilliant program for rapidly developing web layouts in a kind of best-of-both-worlds way that enjoys the benefits of both vector and bitmap design, without all the frustrations that come along with smart objects. Its text handling is also superb, offering a whole lot of customisable settings that are very useful for mocking up web designs, not readily available in either Photoshop or Illustrator.
However, it is not without its faults. On Vista, when typing text in Fireworks things can occasionally go very, very wrong. The solution at least initially is to turn off the “Auto Kern” option in the Properties dialog — but this removes one of the big benefits of using Fireworks in the first place!
There are other options. The problem will go away (sometimes) when the file is closed and Fireworks is restarted — this is hit and miss. More permanently, disabling Vista’s fancy-pants Aero theme (the thing that makes all window borders transparent, gives that snazzy Start + Tab effect, etc.) will ensure you have a glitch-free Fireworks font experience.
The real solution? Sneak into Adobe HQ and write a patch to fix the stupid thing!
17 Jun 2009
Have you ever wondered how to make your PDF files open in a particular page display layout? Sent a PDF of a booklet or magazine to someone and wondered how to make the title appear on its own page?
The “Initial View” setting in Adobe Acrobat is the answer. Simply open Document Properties (Ctrl+D on Windows, or ⌘+D in OS X) and click onto the “Initial View” tab. Here, you can set the initial page display format, opening page, zoom levels, and even what the title of the window is.
When you’re done, just close the Document Properties window and save your file. Easy!