Here are a couple of really useful command-line tools for anybody working with JSON. The first one is jq, which is a somewhat wider known JSON processor. Here’s a nice tutorial with many examples of how this tool is useful. The second one, is jo – a command-line tool for easier creation of JSON output.
Category: Web work
These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Don’t Design Your Emails
I do hate HTML emails with passion. They are always too heavy, often bloated, render horrible, and just plain annoying. I miss the old good days, when email clients were warning users that their signature was too long, spanning more than 4 lines. Today, everybody is sending out HTML emails whether they need to or not. Whether it’s for the signatures, corporate branding, or the “marketing value” or the “professional look”.
Finally, there is someone on my side of the fence, who actually tested the effects of HTML emails and suggests that plain emails are more efficient even for the marketing purposes. Read the whole thing – “Don’t Design Your Emails“, especially if you are involved with email marketing.
The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.
[…]
The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.
Replies to welcome emails were tripled. Cold emails were getting 30-35% open rates and 3% conversion rates, which is incredible.
The Evolution of a Static Website
Next month I’m giving a talk on the evolution of the deployment tools and processes in the last couple of decades. This article is going along the same lines but over a much shorter period of time and only covering the static websites, not web applications. Still quite impressive as to how far and how fast the technology is changing.
Front-End Checklist
This Front-End Checklist is pretty awesome and quite extensive:
The Front-End Checklist is an exhaustive list of all elements you need to have / to test before launching your site / page HTML to production.
It is based on Front-End developers’ years of experience, with the addition from some other open-source checklists.
It goes over generic HTML bits, meta information, web fonts, CSS, images, JavaScript, security, accessibility, performance and more.
The best part is that large parts of this list are pretty easy to automate and integrate with your deployment / continuous delivery tool chain.
MailChimp vs. Amazon SES + Mailwizz
Here’s an interesting story of moving away from MailChimp to a combined setup of Amazon SES and MailWizz, which resulted in overall 92% reduction of the monthly bill. Given it’s not the same functionality, but if you are technical enough and your requirements are simpler than all the functionality of the MailChimp, this looks like a good alternative.