A Lovely 10C Site!

Spent 2 hours today investigating how to insert a table into an HTML email in ActiveCampaign's WYSIWYG editor such that it would have a non-responsive layout on mobile devices.

Raised a ticket and their official support said:

1. ActiveCampaign only supports adding tables via custom HTML.
2. Their support does not cover custom HTML.
3. The best alternative way to add a table is to embed it as an image.

As it turns out, it's a problem with their WYSIWYG template: you can't turn responsive design off. I went into my old raw-HTML template, where I have full visibility and control of things, and got it done in 2 minutes.

Unfortunately, the "visual editor" and the "HTML editor" sides of ActiveCampaign can't talk to each other: you use one or the other, but you can't start something in the visual editor and then polish it up in the HTML editor.

• Why I used the WYSIWYG editor at all: I had to set up the template so others in the team could send their own email campaigns, and never made the time to update my raw-HTML template after that.
• I think we're getting to the point where software is being dumbed down too much — web apps are particularly bad. In fact, we may have been at that point for quite a few years now and I've just been too comfortable in my non-shared setup to notice. Power users lose out big time.

@matigo Been reading the early BOFH stories again?

matigo.ca.

It is a terrible thing to fall down the Youtube music rabbithole shortly before "bedtime".

Excel has lambda but no regex.

I'd probably be okay with not using Google Sheets as a pre-processor for the day job if Excel had regex.

@matigo Haven't found better.

matigo.ca.

Some real nostalgia cleaning up my Dropbox connected apps list.

Like drag2up [antimatter15.com] for example, which I connected in May 2011: a browser extension that enabled drag-and-drop uploads (instead of going through the file browser popup) made for an era before such a thing became standard.

@matigo Hong Kong comes to mind 🤣

Surely there must be some haven, just as there are tax havens.

// @joeo10

matigo.ca.

Wow, what a joke. Excel Forms (Office 365) can't submit a response with data type of number, only text.

@joeo10 I have long wondered how long it'll be before some sites move their HQ outside of the US.

joeo10.10centuries.org.

I feel that sites like Hacker News and Reddit are only becoming more important by the day. Platforms like these allow us to share links to independent sites — blogs above all — that exist outside of the walled gardens of the giants and have their own design, their own voice, and crucially far less moderation.

I'm sure age also has a lot to do with it, but it feels like the web has actually become smaller since the early 2000s. Part of that is thanks to search engines actually returning useful results nowadays, but a big part of it is also that, in so many contexts, if it doesn't exist on Facebook/Instagram/Youtube, then it's considered not to exist at all.

Unrelated: the most useless consequence (for me) is also the most salient: the lack of design on so many pages nowadays. Everything looks the same because everyone uses the same templates — if they have a choice at all.