Engineering
established 10 years ago

After too long, and many many requests, I've finally managed to rebuild the daily digest. It summarizes the goings on on the site for members to let them know what's going on.

Previous versions had been text only so I figured, following the lead of just about everybody else, that I would try to send out something in HTML. Of course, I'm a backend developer server/network/database guy and not a designer.

It turns out that Gmail and the Android Gmail client do not support the <style> tags. In addition, they strip out the <body> tag and turn it into a <div> which can cause some havoc to your layout.

The ugly answer to this conundrum is to use style attributes everywhere, which can get quite ugly and be unmaintainable.

So instead of rewriting all the markup I had created, I looked for and found a PHP library that would rewrite the markup on the fly parsing the <style> section at the top of the page and applying style= attributes everywhere. This works surprisingly well.

The library can be found herehttps://github.com/tijsverkoyen/CssToInlineStyles

There's a bunch more work I could do on formatting the email and attempting to make it more responsive. But I think for the moment, this is probably good enough.

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