I’m having a crazy morning trying to troubleshoot an email template for Lotus. The problem is that it shows fine in Lotus 7 and 8, but one person on the client side is using weird Lotus 7.0.2 and it just wouldn’t show normally there. Black text on white background inside a table cell is missing! WTF! Once I calmed down ands stopped screaming “Just tell them to get a normal email and stop bothering me” I looked around for a solution that would allow me to test the template in all those weird lotus versions. And here’s an awesome one: LitmusApp. The interface is superslick and they also give you a 1 hour pass to test it! I was able to view and troubleshoot my email in that hour. So if you’re having email testing pains like me, give it a try.

I was just thinking about how best to handle having web version of a page and a print version. There’s two approaches, one of them is having 2 separate pages http://www.tanyanam.com/contact and http://www.tanyanam.com/contact?version=print. But when you think about SEO, you’d have to either put “NOINDEX” on every printable page or block them in robots.txt. That’s a lot of work, and what I hate most about it is that you have to have 2 versions of each page on your site!

So a much better approach would be to have a stylesheet for the printable version and just switch the CSS files based on whether it is a browser, printer, mobile, etc. A great article on how to accomplish this: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/goingtoprint/

An excellent article from Smashing Mag with the list of editors for different platforms. Also includes features and pricing.

The one I like? EditPlus! (yeah yeah, I’m on Win, so what? :) It’s lightweight, loads in seconds, yet has all the features I need. I would suggest improving the regular expression support for search & replace, other than that I’m pretty happy.