David Emery OnlineHow to send the perfect HTML e-mail
Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.
I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).
Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?
We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.
Visit ➔Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations
Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example, a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. I believe I have done a 180 on this.
CSS transitions are easily my most used piece of ‘new’ CSS, followed closely by text-shadow. It makes it so easy to add superfluous, non-essential but experience-enhancing touches of animation that I’d never have time to add via javascript. I use them on practically every site I build now – it would be great if other browsers (ok, I really mean Firefox realistically) would implement them as well.
Music is not like water
Well, it turns out every generation gets its own version of flying cars—a certain-sounding vision of future technology based on a vigorously embraced present technology, which passing time eventually reveals to be both laughable and impossible. At the end of the 21st century’s first decade, the internet seems particularly susceptible to the flying car syndrome, with all sorts of zippy schemes gaining traction within our net-addled culture.
With the music industry in conspicuous disarray, it’s no surprise to see flying cars promised as inexorable destiny. There are three particular models of flying car most prominently advertised these days by the music industry’s loudest and most insistent hucksters. These are: 1) The “Free Music” model […] 2) The “Access” model […] 3) The “Music-Like-Water” model.
A very interesting – albeit long – article on potential music revenue models. I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the conclusions – I imagine that most of these models will, while probably not becoming the dominant music consumption model, carve out a decent sized niche – but it’s well worth a read.
Visit ➔SoundManager 2 > 360° player demo
Inline “donut player” example (experimental)… Canvas-based UI. Load progress, seek, play/pause etc.
This is totally cool – we use Soundmanager all over the place already; hopefully we can roll this out without breaking things for rubbish browsers…
Visit ➔Cafetiere
You know how your dad or someone always has a go-to joke or phrase for something? Well over the past year mine has become, “At least, it’s something to blog about.” After walking a few hundred yards in the wrong direction to go and get some Tarantula Piss and Ritz crackers from the petrol station, I took a photo of my Stan Smiths, pressed the stopwatch on, and set off; and one of my first tasks was to ford the mighty Hanna Creek. It wasn’t that tough, really; there’s a road bridge over it.
Flip Flop Flying is the blog of Craig Robinson – him of Minipops fame – and is one of my favourite reads. Lovely little normal stories.
Visit ➔Fuck the foundries
Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.
I couldn’t agree more. The font foundries – like the music industry before them – need to accept the fact that this whole internet thing exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. What they need to be doing – as soon as they possibly can – is changing their licensing so that you can use them on websites in a legal way.
Because they’re just about to have a huge influx of new potential customers for their fonts, so it might – you know – be useful to be able to sell to them.
Visit ➔RED ONE Camera Shoots Esquire Magazine Cover
Esquire magazine today announced that the June 2009 issue of their rather glorious magazine (on sale May 10) features Megan Fox on its cover, and more importantly, that the image was captured with a video camera. Yes. That’s right the REDone’s 4k image is the first I know of to be sitting nicely on the front cover of a high-end, public-at-large magazine.
The march of progress continues, although I think possibly the point may be: Why? It’s a nice enough cover but it’s hardly something that couldn’t have been achieved via a traditional camera.
What I wonder is how on earth you go about wading through the footage to find the ‘shots’? For example on Monday at the Sonic Youth gig I took over 1000 shots and picking between those was hard enough – what do you do when you have 10 minutes of footage at 25fps (which works out as 15,000 frames)?
Visit ➔D&AD Nominations Announced
The nominations for the 2009 D&AD Awards have just been announced. After last year’s furore, will graphic design figure this time?
Never mind graphic design, is anyone else thinking that the websites nominated are almost all rubbish? All chintzy, obvious marketing rubbish with no hint of style, class or innovation. It’s quite interesting how out of touch the traditional design world is from the ‘web’ world.
Visit ➔The Horrors - Primary Colours
Certainly a contender for album of the year, now in handy embedable form:
Visit ➔Fluid Images
Ultimately, I decided to use the approach from his third example, which was to set a max-width of 100% on all images on my website […] And as it turns out, this works just fine for most embedded videos, too.
Well that’s mighty clever.
Visit ➔Phil Spector convicted of murder
US music producer Phil Spector has been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, after a five-month retrial. The 68-year-old, famous for the “Wall of Sound” recording technique, faces between 18 years and life in prison.
So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, Glitter-style? Or is murder, you know, not as bad?
Visit ➔iTunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings
Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price.
While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs.
It’s no real surprise to me that for chart ‘hits’ a higher price leads to lower sales – a chart-based purchase is more likely to be an impulse purchase, so it follows that that impulse is more likely to be quashed by a higher purchase price (especially when placed next to lots of other cheaper chart tracks).
Visit ➔UMG and YouTube officially announce Vevo
The rumours were right. Universal Music Group and Google have announced their joint venture, Vevo – a video site offering UMG’s music videos, with advertising revenues shared between the two.
Isn’t this just the same as what should be at universalmusic.com/videos? Such a pointless piece of band-engineering and marketing rubbish.
Also, while you’ve got a moment check out umusic.com (which is the groups site, as opposed to just music – or something…) – it’s stunningly awful.
Visit ➔Combining Cufon and @font-face
Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.
This looks like a very good solution, and could probably be adapted to work with sIFR as well if you so wished.
Visit ➔Now That's What I Call Unrecouped
Common wisdom has it that the artists who get record deals then go straight to the bargain bins are by definition not very good. But this is myopic. Quite often they aren’t very good, it’s true, but some of them are there due to bad timing, bad luck, wrong single choice or simply that Jo Whiley’s producer decided they didn’t like the record.
Brilliant stuff. There are quite a few bands that I’ve worked with over the years that I’d add to this list, but I’m not going to name names as I think for some it might be a bit soon (the wounds are still fresh…).
Visit ➔Posterous
Posterous – The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.
I’d checked out Posterous a while back but forgotten about it for being maybe a bit to simple (I forget exactly why, to be honest) but they seem to be rocking a pretty good service at the moment. You just email them at post@posterous.com and they take care of the rest – setting up a blog, hosting the images/audio/video attachments you send, the works basically.
The key for me is that they also let that data be sucked out again as well, either via RSS or direct via the MetaWebLog API which means they’re a perfect (free) backend service to power post-via-email onto pretty much any site. Incredibly handy if – like me – you look after 50+ Textpattern sites that need to be maintained by a bunch of people that can’t necessarily be inclined to deal with logging into a CMS on a regular basis.
Visit ➔No Rock And Roll Fun: 25,000
Music. It’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?
No Rock And Roll Fun is one of my favourite music blogs, and one of the few UK based ones at that. Well worth reading if you’re not already.
Visit ➔God Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔Celebration Electric Tarot
We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. The birth of the MP3 has dreampt the death of the CD, and so all across the board Cd sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched, polycarbonate, rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom—freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the evironment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the World Wide Web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want—no waiting. we know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires anymore.
Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is—laid bare.
Good luck to them – I’m a big fan. If you have the means, making your music free like this could have some interesting repercussions artistically (free of the shackles of the album format, ‘hit singles’ and the like).
Visit ➔