Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Telecommute day. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Did a little bit of work on the self study, but spent pretty much the whole day recoding the dean's html e-mail template. When Office 2007 was released earlier this year Outlook 2007 switched from using its own HTML rendering engine to using the HTML rendering engine from Word. This change in behavior caused many HTML e-mails to display unexpectedly in Outlook 2007. We simply stopped using our HTML e-mail templates until I had time to recode them, which turned out to be now. I was going to just take my latest template and try tweaking it to work with both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 and then start testing other clients, but after some investigating, I ended up starting with a MailChimp template and reworked it to achieve the results I needed. MailChimp is hands down the best place on the web to learn how to code HTML e-mail correctly. If the dean's office didn't send so few HTML e-mails (we probably send fewer than 4 per year), I would sign up with them immediately. One of the new things I learned today when coding HTML e-mail: including a space character before the period in any class definitions that start a new line in <style> improves compatibility in certain situations. Bun bo xao dinner at Danny, Drew, and Phil's with Danny, Drew, Phil, Chris, Nate, Mom Ryan, Paul, and Patrick. After dinner, we helped PDD trim their new, artificial Christmas tree.