Building html emails is a royal pain in the arse. Every email clients buggers up something along the way. Here’s the most annoying things I’ve figured out along the way…

Microsoft Outlook 2007

• You can’t use background images in table cells. Thanks Microsoft.
• Forgetting a width on a table cell can cause the whole thing to blow apart to full page width, even though the main table width is defined

Firefox

• Table cells with no align specified default to center aligned. Everyone else defaults to left.

Hotmail

• WTF?!. Images randomly completely screw everything up unless you specifically add an inline style of “display:block”

I shall add to this list as I discover more mind numbingly stupid things I have to deal with…

Integrating forums with your own application and user base can be a real pain in the ass. I’ve done this in the past with Vbulletin and phpBB, but it’s really not that much fun. Both involved some degree of hacking of their core code which means problems when trying to upgrade (you have to remember every tiny thing you did to make it work). As both products improve and get more advanced you’d think they’d have built nice apis to make this job easier. Apparently not yet…

I’ve been pissing about with my own pet project ( http://www.bandresources.net ), and decided I’d like a forum too. Obviously I’d need single sign on. Was even considering building my own forum app from scratch so I would have to deal with the usual headaches, but then I discovered Phorum . OK, it’s been around since 1998, but it always seemed kind of fugly and basic compared to phpBB and VBulletin when I’d checked it out in the past. Turns out it is actually awesome - lean and fast, and it has a fricken API so that it’s really bloody easy to integrate with other apps!

Read on to find out how to integrate in a rediculously short time.

Who knew that when Michael Jackson wasn’t innappropriately touching small boys that he was creating awesome javascript utilitities? (OK probably a different MJ)

Shadowbox is a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application written entirely in JavaScript. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating away from the linking page.

This lightbox lets you view not only images, but flash movies and even entire websites. It is also not tied to a particular javascript framework like most of the other lightbox scripts I’ve found. It comes with adapters for some of the most popular (jquery, prototype etc). You can read more about it, and download the code here: http://www.astro.cz/_java/shadowbox/

I’ve used it in a wee portfolio page I threw together here: http://www.rockurchin.com/portfolio Click on a website link to see it in action. I used it with Jquery.

Yay, another pointless fricken blog hits the interweb. Going to try and post some useful code things I figure out along the way though. Something to do I suppose…