Well I finally got around to sending out the first Newsletter, mostly a little test of PHPList (which powers my newsletter) and of course there have turned out to be issues I hadn’t foreseen, mostly having to do with people who use gmail, hotmail and yahoo (oh that’s not too big of a percentage, is it?).
The basic problem is this: I wanted to send the email as HTML, so I could make it look similar to the rest of my site, and be able to include a newsletter logo at the top which is clickable , and be able to include images in the body occasionally, also. Here is the logo:
I have grown used to styling HTML with CSS, and since gmail and hotmail strip <style> tags, many people received a newsletter with black text on a black background (just lovely). If you’re interested, here is more information on how I worked around the problem. Also this article by Xavier Frenette was very helpful, too.
If you want to see the newsletter the way you were supposed to, it is in the newsletter archive (Newsletter #1).
So I will be sending out a second newsletter very soon, pointing the original recipients here for an explanation of the black-on-black fiasco, plus there were a few things I’d left out and wanted to add, anyway. ‘thorry for the inconvenienthe (that is a HHGTTG reference for all you fellow Douglas Adams fans).
