Worldview: real-time Campaign Monitor metrics

For a number of years I have used Campaign Monitor to provide email marketing services to my clients, and I’ve always gotten a kick from seeing how subscribers interact with my client’s emails. When sending out a large campaign it is satisfying to watch the ‘views’ and ‘clicks’ metrics climb higher as subscribers open the email and click links within the newsletter.

I must not be the only person who enjoys these kind of real-time statistics, because Campaign Monitor have just launched a new reporting feature they call Worldview, which is designed to give instantaneous feedback about your subscribers.

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Give Frank Chimero’s book a kickstart

Graphic designer Frank Chimero is raising funding for a book called The Shape of Design via crowdsourcing service Kickstarter.

In a little over 24 hours the project has raised almost $50,000 in pledges, well exceeding the $27,000 target. Wow.

Check out the video of Frank’s lecture of the same title, given at the Build conference.

In his presentation Frank discusses graphic design in the context of history, philosophy and anthropology, and draws interesting conclusions regarding the purpose and function of design. Apparently The Shape of Design book will expand on the themes of the lecture, so it should be a goodie.

Font Squirrel’s @font-face kit generator

If you want to create your own @font-face kits, you absolutely must check out Font Squirrel’s new @font-face generator tool. All you have to do is upload a TrueType or OpenType format font, and the generator spits out a zip file containing:

• The original typeface for Safari and Firefox 3.5
• A WOFF font for Firefox 3.6+
• An SVG font for Opera, Chrome, and iPhone
• An EOT font for Internet Explorer
• A sample HTML page
• A sample CSS stylesheet

The generator also features options to reduce file size by subsetting the font, cleanup font outlines, and auto-hint glyphs to improve rendering.

Sweet!

The Email Standards Project’s message to Microsoft: Outlook’s broken – Let’s fix it.

Microsoft have announced that Outlook 2010 will use the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails (as does Outlook 2007). In response The Email Standards Project have launched a campaign to send a clear message to Microsoft: Outlook’s broken – Lets fix it.

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Version targeting lessons from Flash

In my last post I outlined some of the problems that might arise from the proposed version targeting changes to Internet Explorer 8. My major concern was that by removing the motivation for web authors to update legacy sites, version targeting might hamper the adoption of modern web development techniques. During the week I have given some more thought to this issue, and it occurred to me that in Adobe Flash we have a fantastic real-world test case from which we might learn if version targeting is a viable strategy for a web browser.

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Breaking the web

When Dean Hachamovitch demonstrated in December that the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser passed the Acid2 test in standards mode, there were calls for Microsoft to clarify if “standards mode” was the default setting for IE8. Last week it was announced on A List Apart and the Internet Explorer blog that IE8 will render pages using an IE7-level rendering engine by default, and that web developers must opt-in to take advantage of the new Acid2-compliant rendering mode.

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Lightweight project management with Backpack

Basecamp is the grandaddy of online project management applications, but I recently discovered that its little brother Backpack can also hold its own as a project management tool.

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Web standards take a beating

If you’ve read any web design blogs during the past week you will no doubt be aware of the hornet’s nest that has been stirred up by Opera’s antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The issues at stake go well beyond Opera’s attempt to put a dent in Internet Explorer’s market share, and commentators have been quick to point out the ramifications for web standards, and the organizations that govern them.

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Ajax form validation using FormBuilder

Over at roScripts there is a nice tutorial explaining how to modify my FormBuilder PHP class so that validation is performed unobtrusively using AJAX. Check it out.

Been a long time

So you might have noticed it’s been quite a while since I last posted on this blog. There are a couple of reasons for the hiatus, but foremost is the fact that I’ve gotten back into producing music again. By comparison, spending my spare time blogging about my job seems kind of spirit sapping. However I don’t want to throw in the towel just like that. I intend to keep posting articles to Pixel Acres, but with less regularity. Hopefully the reduction in quantity will also equate to an increase in quality. I won’t be tripping over myself to make sure I post to Pixel Acres every single week, and will only write on topics that get me fired up. Basically I no longer want to feel like a slave to my blog – after all I started Pixel Acres because I thought it would be fun, not a chore. I hope that my regular readers (if I still have any left!) will stick around to see what I come up with.