Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients
While searching for a new approach to email marketing I came across this excellent resource. It has been put together by the company FreshView for their product Campaign Manager. They have tested 11 desktop email clients and 8 webmail clients and the results are very very useful. I know they will save me some time next time I put together an HTML based email. Take a peek at there here.
Need a Loan?
If so - this is who you need. 
Disney Memories
My wife LOVES Disney World. I don’t think I can successfully describe the depth of this love in a blog entry but let’s just say it’s probably a little bit short of the love she has for our daughter. Okay…maybe not that bad. Either way she would live there if she could. We’ve been together for almost four years now and we’ve already been to Disney World three times together. The first was a day trip on her 22nd birthday. The second was our honeymoon in June of last year and the third was this past February for a little getaway in the middle of some job changes (needed to use some vacation, right?). Naturally we always take the cameras. I haven’t ever done anything with our footage or shots so I thought I’d start uploading bits and pieces. Here’s a little bit from a saxophone quartet in the Magic Kingdom playing on the sidewalk.
Walmart in Need of Developers?
Today I found myself looking for a single song from the soundtrack to The Prince of Egypt. I didn’t have any luck on iTunes and to date that’s the only digital music retailer I have used. I knew Walmart had digital music downloads so I thought I might look there. Unfortunately I was greeted on the music store page with the following message:
To provide the best download experience, we can no longer support Windows 98, ME or NT. Please visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.
First let me reassure you I am not working on Windows 98, ME or NT. I am, indeed, on OS X Leopard and unfortunately Walmart doesn’t think I should be able to use it’s store. Such a tragedy. I wondered what it would read on a Fedora or Ubuntu system so I clicked over to their help center. I found this there under system requirements:
Windows 2000, XP or Vista (sorry, no Macintosh or Linux)
Wow. Is there some contract between Microsoft and Walmart that isn’t being mentioned. I find it somewhat odd that they only cater to Windows Media Player. Perhaps I’m just out of the loop since all of my music and video purchased in the past 3 or 4 years has been on CD, DVD, or from iTunes. It’s not that big of a deal to me - it was only one song I was looking for. Hopefully they aren’t losing too much business this way. I doubt they are. I
Looking into Linux
I’ve recently done somewhat of a ‘re-evaluation’ of my web developing needs. What I have come to is that I really only need a few ingredients to work properly. Now obviously these needs are in the context of a computer because we all know to do development you need something with which you compute. I certainly will need some bare bones terminal access. I prefer to do my file editing in a text editor versus vim and TextMate is my current weapon of choice. I also prefer a GUI (s)FTP/SSH client to the terminal related commands. My current weapon in that area is Transmit. I’ll be needing a web browser to actually use the applications and code I’m writing as well. In a nut-shell those are my needs in a regular project.
I will say that I open up Photoshop to get certain projects started because a designer has whipped up a fancy design for a project. I open the PSD and chop away creating the proper elements for CSS. This is really the only time I ever need any image editing software.
What this boils down to is me looking into a much smaller footprint of an operating system. These basic needs naturally are coexisting with the wants of checking email and some media playing etc. This list has quite naturally led me to look into Linux.
Growing up in a house with a ‘computer guy’ for a father I heard the names UNIX and Linux all the time. It wasn’t until I bought my first Mac that I realized UNIX wasn’t just some old out-dated thing that was only good in the computer history books. As I began to learn more about how web servers worked and writing web applications I heard the Linux thing many-a-time and then realized it had many ‘flavors’. Upon setting up (really I watched a guy smarter than me set it up) my first development server at work I learned that there is a GUI side of Linux I never really knew about. I’d only seen Fedora at the time and now I was being introduced to CentOS.
All that to say I will be looking into different Linux flavors somewhat soon. So far I have the following on my list to check out (in no particular order):
- Fedora
- PCLinuxOS
- gOS
- Ubuntu
- LinuxMint
Busy busy busy!
Well I have not been able to write frequently the past two months because I simply have not had the time. In a week my daughter, Brady, will be 2 months old and that is staggering to think about. She’s still in the hospital but hopefully she can come home soon. With all of the weird hours and hospital visits I haven’t had the time to devote to even a short blog here and there. I do, however, have some thoughts and projects in the works that are coming sometime in the near future.
My wife and I (and Brady if she’s home by then) will be moving in late October into a house with nearly 500 additional sq/ft and I’ll have a nice office that will help me work more efficiently. When that’s here I will polish up the items I’m currently working on and get them up one by one. Here’s a list of some things to expect (not all at once of course):
- More PHP tutorials & scripts
- Instructional guitar videos
- Tutorial series on “Building a Web Application”
- Additional resources I find helpful
- Also look out for me on nettuts.com
Free Ajax Loading GIFs
This afternoon I was working on some ajax loading for the media player on the church’s website. I opened up ImageReady and was about to get rolling on creating a nice animated gif for a “loading”-type message. Then I asked myself the ever-important question: will I be reinventing the wheel? That’s when I searched Google and found this.
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Well Dang, Myspace
A little over three years ago I decided it would be neat to create my own personal page on this nifty website called MySpace. It seemed to be pretty popular and it was certainly growing quickly. I was able to create an account as a “band” and upload music to my page. People were writing messages and commenting on my photos. Even though these technologies were not a foreign concept to me, being in the web industry, I found the site a nice resource to share with friends.
Unfortunately MySpace because more of a monster than anything. It was a hotspot for hackers and security exploiters and quickly gained a poor reputation for that. On the flip side the advertising was going crazy and it was sold for $540 million to News Corp. I became less and less interested in the service as the years passed. I don’t frequent the site by any means but today I decided “hey, why not sign in for old time’s sake”. Upon going to myspace.com this evening I was disgusted
I’m officially a Daddy!
Last Wednesday my little girl, Brady, was brought into this world - 12 weeks prematurely. There were some complications with the pregnancy and it was the overall best action to take. I’m sure I’ll have some friends and/or family looking around here, my personal blog, for updates on her health. Her mommy and I have actually setup a separate blog dedicated just to Brady. If you are interested in staying up to date on her status head over to bradyfaith.com. Don’t hesitate to comment on our entries because we are grateful for any and all support! Thanks!
iPhone Software 2.0: A love hate relationship
I, like many many others, jumped to update my 1st Gen iPhone on Friday afternoon. Fortunately for me I had no troubles with the process. It did take a little while but it isn’t the end of the world. I was actually pretty excited about some of the apps. The night before I downloaded 4 or 5 that I knew I wanted to try out. Here’s a little recap of my first full day using the updated phone.
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