Articles
Different email systems explained
Wednesday 21 December 2005
There was a time when the tech-related question I was being continually asked was about the different options there are when it comes to email services. Several years later, I’ve now decided to write this article so that the next time someone asks me the same question, I can say, ‘look at my website!’ So, what follows is a beginner’s guide to the different types of email service available and my efforts at explaining the pros and cons of each of the four major technologies—Web-based email, POP3, IMAP, and email managed by a Microsoft Exchange server.
1. Web-based email
This is often people’s first foray into the wild world of email: for many people, the word “Hotmail”—possibly the most popular Web-based email service, bought many years ago by the
On getting 10,000 sick bags custom printed
Sunday 28 August 2005
I think it was Lucy Dollard, the Producer for Theatrical Theatrics Productions who came up with the suggestion. Our play for 2005 is Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing, so why not build on the title by advertising the production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe using custom-printed sick-bags?
The idea was a good one. There are over a thousand productions going on in Edinburgh in the festival period in August, and just about all of them to a man are trying to stand out in their self-advertisement on the Royal Mile. Most people lump with fliers, and this is what we did in 2004. We hadn’t done too badly then, selling out every day, but this year we had to sell a hundred seats per show, more than twice what we had had last year. So, I set about trying to find out how to get
On (re)designing this website
Wednesday 24 August 2005
My first foray into Web design was for my sister Helen’s site which went live in the summer months of 1999. I’d taught myself HTML from a book called HTML Goodies, by Joe Burns. The first design was frames-based, with a navigation frame on the left-hand side of the browser window which drove the content pages on the right-hand side. The first site had I think ten pages or so, and had a cream background which we now refer to as “vomit” coloured.
Even back then I saw the benefits of using CSS to control the layout of the page, though I was only using style sheets really to define the fonts, and even then I got caught up with a mixture of relative and absolute font-sizing that looked different on every browser and OS combination I tried.
Gradually I moved away