Building HTML emails is probably more complicated than build normal web sites. You not only have to consider cross-browser issues, but also have to worry about all the different desktop and web email clients out there and how they handle html emails.

I looked at most of the major email clients that are used today (Eudora 6.2, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 6, Yahoo! Mail, and Apple Mail). The design and layout of the email did not look exactly the same on all platforms, but that’s expected. What I did find is that it is far easier to build html emails using CSS than tables. This same html email template would have taken me at least twice as long to code and tweak to get it looking as good using table layout. Also, if the CSS styles are stripped out altogether, what gets left behind is a well formatted text only email.

There are several great reasons to build an accessible web site besides the obvious one of giving equal access to individuals with disabilities.

Building an accessible web site doesn’t cost much more and you gain an expanded audience. It may be costly to build accessibility into an existing web site, but If it is built into the development process from the beginning, the rewards greatly outweigh the cost of implementaion.

So they saved the best for last. Dave Thomas, one of the pragmatic programmers delivered this great talk which touched on both social and technical issues influencing the Rails community. Briefly, the social stuff he mentioned was inclusion in the Rails community and how it needs to improve, especially the attitudes regarding female […]

I just came from Ezra Z.’s talk on deploying Ruby on Rails applications.  The stack he described as best for Rails and the one that they use at Engine Yard consists of: Linux >> Nginx >> Mongrel (cluster) >> Monit.