Anne Kowalski

Thursday, September 06, 2007

MS Outlook Sucks at HTML Email

Take a look at this article to see how MS Outlook 2000 and MS Outlook 2007 render the same HTML email.

Here's one possible solution for MS Outlook email users.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

WordPress Spam Attack

In the span of 15 minutes, I received over 50 comment spams on this blog. That's a lot for a low traffic website like this. I'm not even counting the ones that Akismet automatically caught. Some were held in moderation while others slipped through and were automatically posted. I spent 10 minutes frantically deleting what I could while comment notifications just kept pouring in through my email.

After a little googling, I found this plugin: Spam Karma 2.3.

Problem solved. It worked really, really well for catching the remaining junk.

Creating Photo Thumbnails in Fireworks CS3

Here's a quick guide to creating photo thumbnails in Fireworks CS3. Fireworks does a much better job resizing photos than the software built into most CMS or blogging software. This method is really useful if you have multiple photos you need resized. To make this easier, organize all of the photos you want resized into a folder.

1. Open Fireworks.
2. Select File, Batch Process...
3. Navigate to the folder where you have your batch images stored. If you want all of them resized, click the Add All button. If you only want a few resized, hold down the CTRL key while clicking the images you want, then click Add.
4. Click the Next button.
5. On the next screen, there are two columns. Select Export and click Add.
6. Make sure JPEG is select as the export format in the drop-down menu, especially if you are resizing photos. It is up to your personal preferences as to selecting Better Quality or Smaller File. If you would like more options, just click the Edit button next to the drop down menu.
7. Look in the left column for Scale. Select Scale and click Add.
8. Make sure Scale is selected in the right column. Below the two columns are the options for Scale. Select Scale to Size from the drop-down menu.
9. Key in your resizing preferences. You only need to input one value. For the other value, type variable. This is crucial if you want to keep your images proportionate. Click Next.
10. On the next screen are options for where to save your file. Make sure you do not select the first location (same location as original file) unless you don't care about overwriting your original images. I usually select the second option (custom location) and put the thumbnails in a dedicated folder.
11. Click the Batch button.

That's it! Fireworks resizes your images for you and saves them to the folder.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

First Impressions of Textile

Background

When implementing a CMS for clients, one of the most important issues to consider is how the (often non-technical) end users will format entries. There's a few different ways this is done, but as a default many CMS only allow plain or HTML formatted text. Or, they may include a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor by default. However, WYSIWYG editors are notorious for creating bad code and having shaky browser support. When using a WYSIWYG editor to type entries, I often find myself going into the code view to fix all of the annoying little mistakes the editor makes in syntax.

Enter Textile. Textile markets itself as "a humane web text generator". I first found out about Textile while exploring the open source CMS Textpattern, which uses Textile by default for formatting entries.

Strengths

I admit I had my doubts about this system. I try to approach a CMS the way the typical client would, so to be up to consideration for future use Textile needed to be extremely easy to understand and use...and it was. The system is very straightforward and gives a good way of outputting standards-compliant XHTML.

It is also a very flexible system. A Textile reference sheet is available, which contains all available options. As you can see it is very extensive, and probably more than most people need (like most of the attributes). The tag list on the Textile homepage is sufficient enough for most users.

The readability of a Textile entry is superior to that of HTML. The markup is usually just a few letters or characters instead of bulky HTML tags. It is like little notes all over the page for how something should be formatted.

Special Characters

Oh, and need to input special characters? No problem. It isn't like HTML where there are obscure numerical codes to remember (or look up). Instead, the characters are formatted very similarly to how they are written. A Textile character reference sheet is available for those that need a guide.

Weaknesses

The hardest thing about Textile is explaining to clients about semantics. Most people coming from the world of Microsoft Word and web WYSIWYG editors are unaware of the concept of meaning, rather than creating a look. In this aspect Textile's learning curve isn't that far off from basic HTML. But once the concept of semantics is understood, using Textile is not a problem.

Another weakness for Textile when compared to WYSIWYG editors is that authors can't automatically see their markup to the text as they write it. It is much easier to read than HTML, but they can't see how a heading will look, or the full image within the text while they are writing. They must preview the page before submitting. Some people may do fine not having the visual style present while writing, while others may freak out if their entry doesn't look exactly like the finished product.

If you know and are comfortable with HTML, Textile is of little use unless you don't like reading HTML or the thought of saving a few keystrokes while typing an entry interests you.

Conclusion

Textile is the best solution I've seen thus far to the problem of allowing non-technical users to write on the web using valid XHTML. And unlike TinyMCE and FCKeditor (the top two WYSIWYG web editors) there are no bugs or browser support issues to worry about either. (I know FCKeditor doesn't work with Opera, and I've heard TinyMCE has issues with Safari). For web text entry, Textile is the happy medium be

tween HTML and WYSIWYG.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Installing Magento on Windows XAMPP

I downloaded Magento but could not for the life of me get it up and running using Xampp on my computer. I saw on the forums that many other people are having this problem.

After some searching, I found this excellent guide to installing Magento using Windows XAMPP. It tells you everything you need to know and do on your machine to get the Magento installer up and running. It requires editing some files, but is very easy to follow.