It’s that time again – time to post about what I’ve been doing that was apparently way more interesting than updating my blog at all for a month.

First, some housekeeping stuff. Yeah, I guess I’m using Google Buzz but I don’t really know if I have an opinion on it yet. I am not producing any Buzz-specific content (and I kind of want to punch myself for writing that) but I’m letting it suck in stuff from Twitter, Flickr, etc. Twitter is still probably the thing to read if you’re looking for frequent, inconsequential, context-free tidbits about my life. If you are more interested in reading about things I have read about, you may enjoy my Google Reader shared items. Man, living in the future is confusing.

As for awesome shit I have been up to for the past month, probably the most awesome is Nerd by Nerd East, a miniature gaming convention that took place in Brooklyn at the end of January. Events ran from Friday night (starting with our Pre-Game Social at Barcade and dinner at Dumont) to late Sunday night. The weekend was pretty heavily saturated with fun. I played a ton of boardgames – Pandemic, Zooloretto (which also exists as an iPhone app), Dominion, and Descent (my favorite game of the weekend). There was also a rousing session of True Nerd Trivia and a truly epic marbles tournament. Yes, marbles, and a great deal of drinking. All in all, a thoroughly satisfactory weekend.

It has also been a good month for food. I took advantage of a couple of Restaurant Week deals – lunch at Tabla and dinner at City Crab. Both were great, though I think I preferred City Crab’s prix fixe options over Tabla’s. However, probably the best meal I have had recently was cooked for me by two of my closest friends as a belated birthday dinner. The whole evening was really quite luxurious – I sprawled on the couch watching Top Gear and was fed course after course of astonishingly tasty treats. I kind of wish it was my birthday every month.

Music-wise, I hit up the MC Frontalot show at Pianos a couple of weeks ago. I have a couple of videos up, if it’s videos you want; I recommend starting with Tongue-Clucking Grammarian. I also stopped by Otto’s Shrunken Head for RockEM SockEM, and I wonder now why I did not live in that bar throughout college. It’s adorable, and they have a cinnamon-infused rum I quite enjoyed. I suppose I may have been too resolutely spooky then to set up camp in a tiki bar, but thankfully those days are behind me.

And finally, this past Tuesday I saw BAM’s production of The Tempest. I ended up much closer than I expected to and enjoyed the show very much. I have a particular fondness for the play which I suppose dates from the show at the ART in Cambridge which my brother was involved in. I also used it for a set design project in college and have read it many, many times.

So it’s been a pretty good month, I’d say. Here’s hoping the next is just as much fun.

In honor of the last year of my twenties, I threw myself a birthday party at one of my favorite college drinking haunts in the Village. It’s exactly the same as it was when I spent most Thursday nights there, only now they serve a pretty good dark & stormy and there aren’t any ashtrays. It was extremely strange but entirely entertaining having so many of my friends in one place, particularly friends from such wildly different contexts. Coworkers, ex-coworkers, gaming friends, college friends, and people I’ve known for so long I don’t even remember how I know them. I had a really splendid time and poured myself into a cab at the end of it all with such an abundance of flowers and presents and affection and alcohol that I felt quite fancy. So, I would say that 2010 is off to a pretty good start.

As for what I’ve been up to since October, I think there’s probably too much to fill you in on here. Lots of neat events – the Lord of the Rings concert at Radio City, the Procession of the Ghouls at St John the Divine, Mike Birbiglia with Mates of State, Monster Uprising, book signings with John Hodgman and Stephen Fry, Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm, Skinny Puppy at Nokia Theatre, Dr Sketchy’s (NSFW), holiday craft fairs, and plenty of other stuff. Plus, I’ve still been doing a ton of gaming. I feel like this year I’ve taken advantage of the fact that I live in NYC much more than I have in the previous couple of years, which I’m pretty pleased with.

And one of the most satisfying things about this year was my week in Essex over Christmas, where I got to utterly relax for the first time in months and finally meet my new little niece. I’m not much of a baby person, but even I have to admit that Simone is pretty adorable.

Here’s to even more fun in 2010.

In terms of music, the apex moment for me would have to be seeing Nine Inch Nails at Bowery Ballroom in August. I was very lucky to get tickets, and since I figured it would probably be the one of the last times I will see NIN, I showed up at the venue a couple hours early to swelter with the other black-clad folks on the sidewalk. And it was well worth it – I ended up at the front of the pit, only about a foot away from the stage. It was a fairly obnoxious pit, in fact, and I was mightily bruised for a week or so after, but I’m glad I stuck it out. Take a gander at the setlist – I’m happy I was up front for all those songs. I managed to get a couple of videos, as well. Here’s The Hand That Feeds, Something I Can Never Have, and Gave Up. All in all, a very satisfying show, even if it ends up being the last NIN show I see.

I also stopped by the new Knitting Factory space in Brooklyn a couple weeks back to see cEvin Key doing a DJ set in anticipation of the release of Beyond the Vault and the Skinny Puppy tour that starts next month. I have a little clip of that too, though if you’re not already a cEvin fan you’ll probably wonder why you’re watching a dude standing at a laptop. I really enjoyed the set, and have pre-ordered my copy of the Vault, but the experience did make me wonder exactly why I spent so much time in nightclubs in college. I spent a couple of hours sitting at the bar, nursing an overpriced drink and listening to another DJ play a bunch of Skinny Puppy while we waited for cEvin to go on, and being grateful I don’t still do that a couple nights a week.

And my last musical bit of note is that last night I went to The Lord of the Rings at Radio City Music Hall, and it was fucking incredible. They showed The Fellowship of the Ring in its entirety while the orchestra and choir performed the score live. I actually just re-read Fellowship a few weeks ago so I was perfectly in the mood to see the film again, and the live score was so immersive that it was a completely new experience and I very much enjoyed it. The highlight for me would have to be the young boy who sang the solo you hear when Gandalf is trapped alone on top of Orthanc. If you have the chance to see this in your city, I heartily recommend that you go for it.

I’ve also been doing a ton of gaming the past couple of months. I’m still enjoying my 4th edition D&D game. My little tiefling warlock is level 6 now, and able to fuck shit up pretty effectively. I feel like I understand the mechanics of 4th edition much more thoroughly now, so combat is faster and more fun. It’s a good time.

In addition to D&D, I’ve played a bit of Magic as well – two sealed deck tournaments and a bunch of casual play. The first of those tournaments was an utterly surreal experience for me as I hadn’t actually played competitively in over a decade and had forgotten what it’s like to be the only one with ladybits in a room full of teenage boys. It was a big, noisy affair set in a martial arts gym, of all places, so there was plenty of workout stink in addition to standard nerd stink. But I did have fun, and the other tournament I went to was smaller and much more manageable. It was held at Kinokuniya’s new location near Bryant Park, which I hadn’t even realized was there but have since enjoyed poking around on a couple of occasions. In any event, I think I’m officially sucked back in to Magic now, though I’m keeping my purchase of physical cards restricted to sealed deck events and perhaps the occasional fat pack. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve also been hitting up a monthly boardgame night at Think Coffee, which I wish had been around when I was still an NYU student. Every time I’ve shown up there, they’ve been playing an album I already own (Tom Waits, Pulp, Oingo Boingo). Plus the drinks are great and there are plenty of tables for Dominion and Settlers of Catan and whatever else we end up playing.

And if all this gaming isn’t enough to confirm my status as an incredible fucking nerd, get ready: I also went to the New York Renaissance Faire about a month ago and the Medieval Festival at Cloisters last weekend. I had a great time at both, and both featured mead and turkey legs and lots of cleavage. I feel like I somehow missed dorking out on this stuff in high school, though I’m not sure how as I’m definitely the target market for it. But there’s no time like the present, and really who can object to honeywine and bad accents? I would say that the advantage to the former is that it’s a much more permanent setup and easier to navigate, with more places to buy booze. The Medieval Festival, on the other hand, is free and it’s in Manhattan. It’s hard to argue with either of those qualities. I’ll probably attend both again next fall.

Lastly, and certainly my biggest and most exciting bit of news, is that I’m now an aunt. My brother and his wife had a lovely baby girl named Simone this past week. She’s my first niece, and has claimed my title as baby of the family, which I don’t mind at all. After all, look at that face and that tiny little hand. I would pretty much give her anything she asked for and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

It was at the Webby Awards that I met Trent Reznor, of course. I went with four of my coworkers who also worked on the project for which we won a Webby, and all in all it was an entertaining evening. While I’m typically not the gown-wearing type, once in a while it’s fun to get all dressed up and go to a big fancy party. The cocktails and food were surprisingly awesome, and I discovered that I do in fact like caviar. (This is not an uncommon experience for me – I did not realize until about four years ago that I like olives, for example.) I ran into David Pogue, which was pleasant as I had not seen him in a couple of years, and a coworker was verbally abused by Sarah Silverman, which was of course a delight.

The highlight of the evening for me was, of course, my brief meeting and awkward small talk with Mr. Reznor, who was friendlier and much more tan than I had expected. This was definitely a different Trent than the angsty, long-haired one whose photos still adorn my childhood bedroom, but then again I am not the angsty, long-haired girl I was ten years ago, either. Which is definitely for the best, all things considered. In any case, my coworkers enjoyed seeing me geek the fuck out, and I have some poor-quality footage of a relevant bit of the awards show itself.

As for the nerdier bits: I am currently playing in a 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which is my first taste of D&D in at least a decade, and am quite enjoying it. I know most of you either have never heard of 4E or have very strong opinions about it already, so I shan’t spend a lot of time discussing its relative merits as compared with the game you probably played in middle school. But I will say that taken on its own terms, it’s a streamlined, tightly-designed game and I am digging it.

Magic, too, has changed quite a bit since I last dabbled in it. I am not engaging in it regularly at the moment, but I played a few games over Shackburgers a couple weeks back and had a good time. I’ve also just downloaded Duels of the Planeswalkers, which in addition to being a difficult name to say aloud, is also a savory translation of Magic to an XBLA-friendly format. I haven’t played more than a couple of duels so far, but apart from some control awkwardness that can make it difficult to zoom in on certain cards sometimes, it seems to be a solid effort and one that I intend to spend more time with.

I have a few other quick bits to mention. I did indeed purchase an iPhone 3GS, as several of you have wondered, and it’s pretty fucking fantastic. The compass functionality is tailor-made for moments of subway emergence confusion, and the whole thing is just so much faster and smoother and more lovely than my first gen that I really couldn’t be happier with it.

And finally, I had the chance last night to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and found that while the theatre itself was almost too hot to be believed, the show was entertaining and still safely on this side of the line between fun and excessively wacky. I recommend it.

This is all that I have to tell you about for now. More generally speaking, life is pretty great at the moment. I am busy as it seems I always am, but I am also managing to cram a surprising quantity of awesome into each day. What more could I want? Aside from a spaceship and an army of robot servants, of course.

Yesterday my company won a 2009 Webby Award in the Cultural Institutions category, for the site we built for The Guggenheim. It was a challenging project for all of us and we had to jump through a number of technical hoops to get it done, so this award is especially satisfying to everyone on my team. You’ll have to excuse this brief interlude of shameless self-promotion. I mean, I guess you don’t have to excuse it. You could absolutely decline to excuse it, I don’t really mind. But the point is: we won a Webby, and I’m pretty happy about it. ]]> http://caoine.org/2009/05/06/back-patting-horn-tooting/feed/ 10 http://caoine.org/2009/04/14/techniques-for-html-email/ http://caoine.org/2009/04/14/techniques-for-html-email/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:30:16 +0000 emma http://caoine.org/?p=2051 Since I mentioned on Twitter that I’ve been producing a lot of HTML email in the past year or so, I’ve gotten a bunch of requests for help in this area. This is because HTML email is a notoriously bizarre and unpredictable little subset of front-end development, and one can be a great web developer without having the faintest idea how to do an email that will work in most mail clients.

First, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. I’m not really interested in arguing about whether or not HTML email should exist; while I’m aware that lots of folks think it’s utterly loathsome and to be avoided at all costs, I’m also aware that it’s something lots of my clients want and request. So why not at least make an effort to do it well?

Ok. So what I’ve basically tried to do here is collect some of the little tricks and oddities I’ve had to learn while building this stuff. I’m not calling them best practices, because they aren’t, really – they’re just my practices. There are certainly other ways to approach email development, and plenty of them work as well or better than mine depending on what mail clients you or your company needs to support. Speaking of supported mail clients, here’s the list I’m using currently:

• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Apple Mail
• AOL Webmail
• Gmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• Hotmail

For the webmail clients listed above, I support the following browser/OS combinations: Firefox 3/IE6/IE7/Safari 3 for Windows, Firefox 3/Safari 3 for OS X. And there’s also a number of clients I support sort of unofficially. What that means is that while they are not part of the normal testing process to which all my emails are subjected, I don’t use anything I know is unsupported in these clients, and I work around their bugs as much as possible. Here’s that list:

• Entourage 2008
• Notes 6
• Thunderbird 2

This combination of mail clients means that I’m pretty severely restricted in terms of what I can do when building an email. If you take a look at Campaign Monitor’s excellent 2008 guide to CSS support in email, you’ll see that there aren’t a whole lot of things that work in every single client on that list, and their list is pretty similar to mine. Essentially, most of the standard CSS techniques I would use when building a page for display on the web are not safe for use in email. What this means is that my approach to email development is entirely different than my approach to web development, despite the fact that they both involve HTML.

I care very deeply about semantic markup, standards compliance, accessibility, human readability, and all of those lovely things. That is, when I’m building a website. For email, I throw all of that out. My top priority for email is that it displays correctly in all the mail clients I support, and my second priority is that it’s still more-or-less readable before images are enabled (since images are turned off by default in many mail clients). For most web developers interested in standards, this approach sounds like heresy. It may help if you consider that many of the concerns we have when building websites simply don’t exist when building something as transient as an email. It isn’t going to get indexed by a search engine, for example, unless you do a web version as well – and if you’re doing a web version, use web techniques instead.

My basic strategy for HTML email is tables, tables, tables. And not the kind of tables you probably used on the web in 1998 – it’s even worse than that. Because I unofficially support Notes, I try to avoid making my tables too complex. This means I favor nesting instead of using colspan and rowspan because of their historically spotty Notes support. Notes also has trouble with too many levels of nested tables, but in practice I find that I rarely need more than five levels or so. The code this strategy produces is ugly as sin, but the resulting email will display correctly almost anywhere. Also, specify widths on all your tables, even nested ones that you wouldn’t think would need it – I’ve had trouble with Entourage and width-less tables.

The other thing I do that will be surprising and dirty-seeming if you’re used to good web development is that I rely almost exclusively on spacer images to position things, instead of CSS positioning (or cell padding, or line breaks). I stick each spacer image in its own cell and slap style="display: block;" on it. These latter two steps are not always necessary, but they avoid the once-in-a-while Hotmail and Outlook spacing problems that used to drive me nuts. Of course CSS positioning is more elegant, but none of the normal properties I’d use on the web can be trusted in email. So I’ve had to rekindle my relationship with one-pixel transparent GIFs. If you still end up with whitespace where you don’t want it, try stringing together your code and removing linebreaks where possible.

As for text styling, there are a couple different ways you can approach it. The CSS properties related to text are safer than the positioning stuff – font-family, font-size, font-style, text-decoration and such are safe enough to use. But because I like to be sure my emails will display without any CSS whatsoever, I slap the style attributes on font tags and on links. You can avoid using the dreaded font tag, of course, by slapping your styling on the relevant cell or what have you, but I actually find it easier this way and I like having the redundancy in just in case.

And that right there is the only CSS I’ll use in an email: display: block on images and text styling on font tags and links. That’s it. It’s almost beautiful in its perversity, don’t you think?

That about covers the tips I have as far as making sure your email will display properly in most mail clients. I leave the rest to your tinkering. As for making it mostly readable without images, this can be tricky if the email in question is a company newsletter or announcement, as many of the ones I build are. These tend to be pretty image-heavy. Nevertheless, try to use HTML text whenever possible. One thing that may take you by surprise here is the difficulty of using background images, at least if you support Outlook 2007 or Gmail. If you don’t, lucky you. But if you do, try to make sure the text bits of your email are on top of a solid color instead of an image, or at least be aware of what it looks like when the background image gets stripped out and adjust accordingly. For the parts that must be images, use alt attributes on anything with text in it. I also like to include title attributes on both the link (if there is one) and the image itself – it’s redundant but it also means you have a better chance of something being there if a recipient is looking at or mousing over your email with images turned off.

I could also write a lot about actually sending your email, and reducing its spam score, but for right now I just wanted to assemble some bits and pieces about email development itself. I will say that for deployment, it’s pretty tough to beat Campaign Monitor (and their blog is great, too). The rest will have to wait for another day.

If your job includes producing HTML email, I hope you have found this post helpful. And if your job has nothing to do with HTML email, I hope this post has made you thankful for that fact.

1. Spending St Patrick’s Day drinking novelty martinis at a sake bar. Typically St Patrick’s Day, like Halloween and New Year’s Eve, is a terrible, terrible night to go drinking in Manhattan. But it turns out that Japanese places don’t really serve green beer, and are thus blessedly un-packed. Also recommended: wearing black pants, so that when you spill your dark purple pomtini a couple hours into the evening, nobody can tell.
2. Parents. Who else would sacrifice an entire weekend to drive to New York City and shuttle you around for two days doing errands that require a car, including braving Ikea on a Saturday? And then help you drill things that need drilling and hang things that need hanging and move furniture that needs moving and then take you out for awesome Mexican food? It’s a short list, let me tell you.
3. I have two podcasts to recommend. One is the second Penny Arcade D&D series, which is good for entertaining me during my new, longer commute. The other is Planet Money, which is good for depressing the fucking hell out of me during my new, longer commute. But in a fun, informative way! If you’ve listened to any of the This American Life shows on the economy (The Giant Pool of Money, Another Frightening Show About the Economy, Bad Bank), Planet Money is in the same vein. And if you haven’t listened to any of those TAL shows, you really should.
4. And speaking of the colossal mindfuck that is the economy, brown bagging it is also recommended. I was really good about brining my own lunch to work for a long time, years ago. Then I got very lazy. Now I’m trying to get back in that habit again, and after just a couple of weeks it’s sort of shocking how much money I’m actually saving. Which means, of course, that it’s shocking how much money I was spending on lunch. But let’s be positive, here.
5. Another reason packing your lunch is recommended is that you then don’t feel as guiltly when you overspend on a delightful, ridiculous lunch once in a while. Like hopping a cab to Stand in the middle of the day for a chicken burger and hazelnut chocolate milkshake with a much-missed former coworker. The milkshake, by the way, is also heartily recommended.
6. And finally, my iPhone app recommendation at the moment is Zen Bound. It’s a lovely, lovely game.

• Happy Up Here by Röyksopp
  You should go and watch this video, because it is oustanding.
• State of the Art: Google Geniuses at Work on Free Goodies
  The consensus around my office after we all read this Pogue piece was that most of us knew about most of these features, but none of us knew about all of them. This is in spite of the fact that they’re pretty much listed right here.
• MetaFilter: Squeeze in, get online for a better life
  A MeFi post on net rooms in Tokyo. The linked articles are worth reading for their own sake, but I was immediately struck by how much the photos reminded me of the coffin hotels described in William Gibson novels like Neuromancer. I am aware, though, that capsule hotels already exist and have for a while.

• Consumerist: Identifying yourself as a lesbian gets you banned on Xbox Live
  Sometimes, the stupidity in the world causes me actual physical pain.
• Etsy: JRGOLDBERG
  If you enjoyed Jellyfist, please to investigate J.R. Goldberg’s new Etsy shop. I would buy the place out if I were a little richer or a lot drunker, but as it is I could not resist picking up one of these print sets as a housewarming gift to myself.
• Though I think the “fail” thing is now cringe-worthy and generally to be avoided, I laughed my goddamn ass off at this photo. Then I saw this sketch and was afraid.

And here are a few technical bits, which you may skip unless you are also a web nerd.

• At my day job, I produce a fair amount of HTML email for clients. If you have also had occasion to write HTML email, you’re probably aware that it’s a murky, non-semantic tangle of pre-CSS markup and pure arcana. The Campaign Monitor blog, however, provides a huge amount of badly-needed information that’s based on actual testing, not guesswork. This week I made use of two of their posts: one on support for nested tables and one announcing a new Campaign Monitor report on mail client usage that I’ve already found extremely helpful.
• WebAim Screen Reader Survey Results: Fascinating information that will be of use to anyone interested in web accessibility.