I got an email from a long-time reader saying the thing that shocked him about my early web writing was that I told the truth. I wasn't trying to sell you anything. I just wrote what occurred to me. He was a mainframe programmer. I've thought about that, and I'd love to understand how one can be a programmer and not always be searching for the truth. Unlike just about any other profession I can think of, ours depends on telling the truth.You can't lie to a compiler is one of my programming mottos. Garbage in garbage out. I write blog posts the same way a tester writes reviews of software. You have to be ready to hear the unvarnished truth. That's the ethos of blogging as far as I'm concerned. And it's why tech bloggers can do it better than most. Not saying they do of course. There was some real shabby blogging around HTTPS and Google, I kept wanting to ask if they debug their software with that kind of logic? (The equiv of asking a troll if they kiss their mother with that mouth.) #New feature. Now in the footer of the home page, you can see a realtime readout of how long this blog has been running in preparation for the big 25th anniversary celebration, whatever it may turn out to be. Of course you have to have JS turned on to see it. #
I had been looking for the animation of Darwin as a kung fu fighter, and finally found it. I don't want to lose it again.#
Here's what a reader wrote in 1995 about my earliest blogging efforts. It means so much more now. The loop has closed on all of it, esp the last couple of paragraphs.#
Those were incredible times, we had tons of what I called blue sky, probably more possibility for technology and humanity since the 1920s (the advent of electricity and cars). I was in perfect position to explore all that blue sky. A confluence like that is rare. Right place, right time, right friends. 💥#
Biden's latest gaffe is about as important as Orrin Hatch removing glasses that weren't there. Everyone made such huge deal about it, but if they had to admit the truth, they'd have to say they do shit like that too. It's human.#
Adams is a small chain of grocery stores in the Hudson Valley. There's one near where I live, in Kingston. They buy from local farms. And they make a lot of their own products, like spaghetti sauce and cookies, and it's all realllly good.#
- I got yesterday's Scripting News looking pretty good in email. Learned a lot. Most of the problems were with how HTML email works these days, not Mailchimp. I needed to factor it out to see that. On the other hand they do some stuff that I can't abide, so this is a necessary exercise. :-)#
- Caveat: I only tested in Gmail running in Chrome on a Mac. I'm sure other browsers on other machines and other email clients will raise their own kind of hell. 💥#
- Some of what I learned:#
- You can only use standard web fonts. I'm using Arial for everything. #
- You can't include CSS files, all CSS has to be in-line in a <style> element in the <head> section.#
- Styles for <body> are ignored.#
- Don't use lists unless you want their indentation. There appears to be no way to override it. I was using lists, per standard best practices, for stories. I did a hack and replaced all <ul>s and <li>s with divs, and styled them the way I wanted them to look. (This will fuck up deeply nested lists in my stories. Thinking about how to avoid that. Come to think of it, it will probably fuck up this very list. Heh.)#
- I'm using AWS to send the mail, and I'm going to have to do some kind of dance to configure it to let me send email from an address I never use. I can't use my gmail address, because I am not sending the email from gmail. That is a new architecture of the net created by who-the-hell-knows since I last did any programming with email. Not saying it's bad, it was something I had to learn about. I suspect that it will be a rejiggering of the dance you have to go to get an HTTPS server, why not use the same dance? I will be learning more about this for sure. #
- PS: Here's the followup.#
