If all goes as planned, if you're subscribed to the nightly email, you should get two copies of the posts for April 27, one sent by the old software, and one sent by the new. The new version might look better in your mail reader app. That was the point of this transition. #
Here's a Google form where you can let me know how it went. Did it work? How many emails did you get? Does the v2 email look better than the old version? In general do you want to comment?#
I had to do a rewrite because when I originally wrote it, I misunderstood how CSS styling works in some/most email clients and it required a very deep rewrite of the software, it was actually harder to do the conversion than it was to write the software in the first place. And the app was running on an old version of PagePark and depended on Dropbox, and had broken in many ways over the years. But I never had the time to zero in on this. #
Now was the time to do it, because I want to do an excellent email sender for WordLand. And in order for that to have even a small chance of working, I needed to do this transition, to get fully up to date on the best practices for HTML email in 2025. #
And yet another plug for ChatGPT. It's like having a library of medical journals for a general practitioner. I'm sure they have this, if a GP has a question about which specialist to send a patient to. And then they probably have good reference materials for the specialist too, to be sure they're using the latest proven techniques for treating disease. Believe it or not we have nothing like this in software development. Which means we don't interop, and don't use prior art and are constantly reinventing each others' work because there's no way to find out about it. No conferences, no journals, nothing but hearsay and O'Reilly books and I hear they aren't very good these days. Enter ChatGPT, and all of a sudden if you have a question it has the freaking answer. It's as if medicine went from the pre-internet days to now, in just a couple of years. Only more so because medicine was considered a discipline, where developing software never has been. Now at least us practitioners have the tools if not the respect. #
PS: The signup page moved to subscribe.scripting.com. It's the same software now running on my latest server software, and served via HTTPS.#
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)