Creating good HTML emails

Creating good HTML email is a totally different ball game! All the rules/concepts that apply to creating good web pages do not necessary apply to creating good HTML emails at all.

In fact, none of the theories for creating good HTML web pages holds true for creating good HTML emails!
In this article, David Greiner gives a good idea what should and shouldn't be done. Incidentally, this validated most of the stuff that we had already been doing based on our experience with various webmails & HTML email blasts/campaigns that we worked on.

Here are the summary of points given by him:

• Use tables for layout and as containers for background colors
• Use nested tables instead of margins & alignments
• Set the width of each cell instead of at the table level
• Use pixels instead of percentage widths
• Use inline CSS always
• Design with the assumption that images will not be visible by default
• Use "alt" text for images
• Aviod spacer images
• Always use image widths & heights explicitly
• Prefer JPG & GIF images
• Test, Test & Test more with various clients...

And now, some more considerations for mobile emails:

• Keep the total width to less than 600 pixels
• Be aware & design with consideration that text may be resized
• Test, Test & Test more with various devices...

Read the full article by David Greiner on 24ways.org for the details and the code here.

Beautiful Forms using HTML5 and CSS

Even though HTML Forms are very boring & repetitive work requiring a lot of effort, they can be made really beautiful using the new features of HTML5 and a bit of advanced CSS.

First off, the Disclaimer:

• HTML5 is still a Draft and in the "Last Call" state in the WHAT Working Group.
• Not all browsers support HTML5 equally well - so expect varying results across browsers even for the same element
• Not all browsers support all elements/features yet
• Check out the list of differences between HTML4 and HTML5 here
• Check out the new features of HTML5 Forms here
• Wikipedia entry for HTML5 is here

Now that we have all those points out of our way, lets start with the actual stuff.
In this article on 24ways.org, Yaili explains in great detail how to use HTML5 and advanced CSS with CSS3 features to create really great looking forms.

Here are the most important points:

• Use fieldsets to for enclosing and grouping input elements.
• Use ordered lists to group each label+input pair of elements
• Use automatically generated counters using :before and :after psuedo-elements
• Dollops of CSS styling to make the form & its elements look really kewl

Here is the output as I see it in FF3.5.7 and IE7 on WinXP Pro - the differences are clearly noticeable. Also, the placeholder text does not show up at all!

FF 3.5.7	IE 7
Note the missing placeholder text, rounded edges and credit card images	Note the missing placeholder text, pointed edges and missing credit card images

Read the full article by Yaili on 24ways.org for the details and the code here.

Full Version of Software for a Buck?!

How would you like to have a licensed copy of a Full version of a software for 99 cents ?!

While scanning SD for deals, saw a post mentioning that the full version of WinPatrol PLUS will be available for just 99 cents on January 29th 2010! This lead me to the blog Bits from Bill written by Bill Pytlovany who created WinPatrol.

While this in itself is a very good deal for those still using Win platforms, the blog post contents got me thinking deeper. His blog points towards a paradigm shift in the Business Model - Songs are being sold for 99 cents a pop from the likes of Amazon, many iPhone apps are being sold for 99 cents each too. This banks on the human psychology/thought process of "what the heck - its only a buck..." to trigger impulsive buying and increasing sales. The same guy would have contemplated a hundred times had the price tag been say even $5! Could this be an industry saving business model?! Only time will tell ...

But in the meanwhile, make the most of it by taking the WinPatrol PLUS 99¢ license only on Friday, 29th January - note the icing on the cake that this license will be good for life! And read more about Bill's views on his 99 cent software experiment, the results of which will also be published on his blog over the weekend. I am all for this software pricing model as it is in the interest of the consumers!

HP USA Customer Service at it's best!

My HP Laptop adapter wire started to fray and then the adapter went bust in less than 10 months of ownership. And then the laptop just shutdown and would not boot up at all. Here is my (scary) experience getting it fixed.

I had a very harrowing experience with HP Support/Customer Service here in the US. Due to the adapter going bust, I suspect that the MoBo & RAM was fried on my laptop which was still under warranty. I called the Customer Support who sent me a pre-paid box to mail in the laptop. I mailed in my laptop & adapter and when called in to check the status, I was told that the adapter was bust due to my mishandling and so I would need to buy a new adapter myself. Also, since the laptop did not boot up with the adapter that I had sent in, it was being sent back to me as nothing could be done! And while we are discussing this, would you like to buy an original HP Adapter?

I just could not believe my ears and was really angry at them for this action. Couldn't they just use one of their adapters and confirm whether that was the only problem? They said that they would use only the items supplied and did not have any other "good" adapters with them. I talked to a few other guys and most of them told the same thing - but a few others did not have any idea at all and just read out the problem statement that I had mentioned in my initial call!

To top it all, all this was happening just a week before I was scheduled to take a 3 week vacation to India and 2 weeks before the warranty was going to expire - arrrggghhh!!!

At this point, I just lost all hope and left it to HIM to perform a miracle. And I was in for a pleasant surprise on Christmas eve - I received the repaired laptop with a brand new adapter in mail! The sheet accompanying laptop mentioned that the MoBo & RAM had indeed been replaced, HDD formatted & re-imaged and a new power adapter had been supplied :D

So, even though the Support/Customer Service did not have much clue, the Tech Service guys did a really good job. They did exactly what they should have done - replaced the busted parts as the laptop was still under warranty!

This is in sharp contrast to my experience with Dell Customer Service where-in everyone consistently told the same (correct) thing and the resolution was spot-on. I had a problem with the keyboard once and the adapter once and both times I was mailed in the replacement parts with clear details on what to do next.

Thankfully all's well - that end's well (atleast for now)!

The case of missing panel items in Ubuntu 9.04

I noticed that the icons/items for battery status & wi-fi signal were missing from the panel in my desktop for Ubuntu 9.04. These had just vanished into thin air without my doing anything at all! Here's how I got them back...

The System > Help and Support > Internet and Networks menu was the first place I tried to glean some info from. It just mentioned that I need to work with the Network Manager icon in the System Notification area which I found out is just another panel in the desktop. This still lead me nowhere on how get the missing panel items back!

So just to try out a hunch, I right-clicked on the panel next to the calendar applet and selected the Add to Panel... option. It showed me a whole lot of items that I could add to the panel and one of them was Notification Area. Adding this to the panel immediately brought up the NetworkManager Applet icon and the Power Manager icon in this area. With this, the missing panel items were back to their respective places.

However, the Power Manager icon kept coming and going at it's own will. So I added another panel item called Battery Charge Monitor which thankfully continued to stick to the panel and did not disappear!

Good to be back!

Feels really good to be back fresh & fully charged up after a 3 week vacation covering 4 cities in India and a short stopover in Dubai (courtesy Emirates Airlines)!

Keeping my New Year Resolution, I have started blogging in earnest! Lets' see how far I can keep up with my resolution ;)

MariaDB drop-in replacement for MySQL

Since Oracle is in the process of buying out Sun & hence MySQL, the creator of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius went on to create MariaDB which is a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

Seems that they are working on lots of improvements and cleanup of the legacy code that had crept in. They have a better storage engine to replace MyISAM, speed improvements, more extensions, etc. Check out the differences here.

Some interesting reading on MariaDB & MySQL can be found on Monty's blog.

One of the very interesting things I stumbled across on the Monty Program website was their business model titled "The hacking business model". This is the model on which their company runs. It is very transparent and employee friendly model which works towards a win-win situation for the company as well as the employee. Read more about it here. This is a very good business model for companies that work on OSS - wish my company was based on this model ;)

Charging & Tethering BlackBerry on Ubuntu 9.04

If you just want to charge your BlackBerry device, there is a stand-alone tool bcharge from the Barry stable. This application scans the USB bus for BlackBerry devices using libusb and sets the USB ports to which they are connected to output 500mA if they are not already doing so. This is installed alongwith Barry so no separate install or configuration is required.

For those interested in tethering their BlackBerry devices, check out the berry4all project which is a free open-source software for tethering a BlackBerry device on linux & mac. Install instructions for berry4all can be found here. The pre-requisites for this are that python, pppd, libusb and the python usb (pyusb) modules need to be installed.


Check out the specs & reviews of Blackberry Pearl 8100 on Amazon:

Sync BlackBerry on Ubuntu 9.04

One of the pitfalls of moving to Ubuntu 9.04 was that my BlackBerry Pearl stopped charging and synching with the computer. Here's how to resolve it ...

After a bit of googling, I stumbled upon the Barry Project which is an open source synchronization, backup, restore & management application for BB devices.

Install Barry
Open the Synaptics package manager & do a quick search for "barry".
Select & install the packages barrybackup-gui, opensync-plugin-barry, barry-util & libbarry0.
Now create a new launcher on the desktop and enter the command as "/usr/bin/barrybackup".

Configure Barry
Connect your BB phone to your laptop and fire up the luancher short-cut created above.
Barry will assign a unique device PIN number and ask you to configure this device.
Assign a meaningful name and configure what you want to Backup & Restore. I normally choose only the Address Book as that is the only thing that I use.
Another option it asks is to Prompt for label on every backup - use this option if you want to append a specific label to the name of the file Barry creates. Note that the file name already has the PIN, date & the time in it so I leave this unchecked.

Use Barry
Now go ahead and press the Backup button to backup whatever you had configured it to!
Also, once the data has been backed up, you can run the launcher to restore previously backed-up data or to backup data again.





Check out the specs & reviews of Blackberry Pearl 8100 on Amazon:

Sansa e250 on Jaunty Ubuntu 9.04

After installing Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on my Dell Vostro 1000, I had never tried to connect my Rockbox -ed Sansa e250 to it. On connecting it to my laptop, the player would not get recognized and I was at a total loss as to what to do. Here's how I solved it ...

A search of the ubuntuforums quickly showed that I was not the first or the only one to face this problem. The culprit is the older version of glibphoto on Ubuntu 9.04!!!

The solution lies in removing all configuration for Sansa from the libgphoto config file:

su gedit /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-libgphoto2.fdi

Feel free to substitue su with sudo/gksu/gksudo as you feel free as all them work the same in this case. You can also use vim/emacs or any other editor that you like instead of gedit.

and then restarting the hardware abstraction layer daemon - hal:

/etc/init.d/hal restart


Now if you plug-in your Sansa e250, it should work!!!
So it is working as of now - have tried it a couple of times. Lets see if this works out consistently!



Check out the specs & reviews of the Sansa e250 on Amazon: