Aug 21, 2009 | blog
Some say that plain text is best. Who am I to complain? When something as simple as 140 characters is enough on Twitter to convey a message, or 160 characters for a mobile text message? We can communicate a lot with very little – and a very simple medium: plain text.
So why are there so many contrasting opinions about using rich text in communications? Especially email?
Email has become one of those communications tools that seem to raise the ire of the “plain text is best†crowd. Some folks just don’t appreciate the HTML emails or fancy formatting others put into their signatures. I’ve seen some folks get downright angry towards these emails, and you can always tell who these folks are as their replies always come back in plain text.
While I won’t pretend to understand the controversy, I do think the plain text crowd is more “no nonsense†and just likes to get about their business. Whereas the rich text crowd probably tends to be heavier on the creative side, and likes to communicate with a bit of aesthetic value.
As we move further into the future, of course, rich text becomes easier to integrate into more communications mediums. The utility of plain text will remain though, as the lowest common denominator for any publishing platform as their job is to simply distribute information – and all that really needs is text.
Oct 13, 2008 | blog
Its no secret that I’ve long been a fan of Gmail. In fact, I moved my main email domain to Google’s hosted service about two years ago. I’ve loved the flexibility, space, search, and tagging that are tightly incorporated into the service.
The only problem was a few niggling odds & ends. Not big issues mind you, but a few things that just make it hard to switch 100% to a web-only email environment. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been about 87% of the way there already. When out & about I use the web interface daily for most email tasks. When I need to find something – use the web interface for searching. I’ve used both POP and IMAP to view mail on my Windows Mobile phone since I signed up – and much more.
The few items have been enough for me to keep an email client installed, and here they are:
- Creating HTML emails
- Custom HTML Signatures
- Contact Synchronization with my phone (the real biggie)
A number of these I’ve gotten around. Early on I found that I can cut & paste an email signature from a web page to a Gmail email when composing. Simple, but not convenient. The number of specialized HTML emails that I send are small and the Gmail editor is up to 99% of the tasks. The contact thing is the hardest to get past though.
I have a Windows Mobile phone, and contacts in Outlook sync right to the phone easier than anything else that exists out there. Period. I’ve had Nokia, Samsungs, Motorolas, and BlackBerrys – and all had sync tools that worked, but none as easy as Outlook to Windows Mobile.
At any rate, the real issue with contacts is getting them synchronized between Outlook and Gmail. It’s extremely tough. With the upcoming release of the T-Mobile G1 “Google phoneâ€, it looks like all that might actually be ending. With built-in Gmail support it also has the ability to sync your phonebook with Gmail contacts. Sweet!
So I’ve been debating whether to throw down on this device or not. It may be the one, the final piece that let’s me go web-only for email management.
Oh, the signature piece – yeah I found this great Firefox plug-in called Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures which allows you to have up to four HTML signatures for each Gmail account. Highly recommended!
So is this the final piece to my text communication puzzle? It very well may be.
And 3G to boot! 😀
Mar 1, 2008 | blog
Hi all!
Just a quick post to mention the updated “post footer” changes that I came up with. Since adding a few additional services here on my blog, I’ve disliked how messy and unorganized the bottom of each post had become. So today, I set out to tidy it up a bit and make it a bit more pleasant to look at.
I’ve simply defined a specific section for the “footer” of each post that draws a border, added light background shading, consistent font size, and a simple table to hold the “ShareThis” feature on the right-side of the column. I think it helps define the end of one post and lets the header text of the next post stand out a bit better. Previously it seemed like it rambled from header, to post content, to some tagging, to sharing options, to related posts, and finally to the post meta data at the end.
The base theme is Misty Look by Sadish Bala, currently in version 3.5 supporting WordPress 2.3.x. I’ve made several customizations over the past year and have found the code fairly easy to modify if you’ve got a reasonable understanding of HTML and PHP. Let me know if you have a question on what I’ve done, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.
I hope you agree that this makes each post a bit more readable, and isolates the post meta data that can be skipped if you want. If you don’t agree… well I sure would like to hear your opinions! My goal is to have things readable, fairly organized, and hopefully, easy to read for you when you come to visit. Just leave a comment if you have an idea or feedback – I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Nov 11, 2006 | blog
Ok, its late – 2:30am Saturday morning. But I’ve done it! RickMahn.com has a new layout. I’ve leveraged a 3-column theme here on the blog, and have gotten to use several new features that I had been planning on for some time. And it only took 4 hours to do!
The nice part about this layout is that the main body of every post has much more room for text and pictures. It also has a bit cleaner CSS structure for text, bullets and the like. Another neat feature was the support for sidebar widgets in WordPress – it made it much, much easier to set up all the specialized items that I had on the original configuration.
Well, off to get some rest – I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to go to the Power Sports show in downtown Minneapolis – one can hope anyway.
Dec 13, 2005 | blog
I’ve finally got around to customizing my blog here at Blogger! Neat stuff, and good flexibility compared to MSN Spaces. That is not to knock Spaces at all, it is maturing quite quickly – the differences are substantial, and I hope to make use of both services as I go forward.
