This Week’s Program: Oct 12 - Oct 16

After last week’s little email fiasco, I learned that TinyLetter wasn’t as chill as I thought it would be when it came to accepting plain text over SMTP. I attempted to send it some plain text Markdown, thinking “Hey Markdown is readable by humans after all.” My ambitions got the best of me, and TinyLetter reacted by treating that plain text as an HTML document. Undeterred, I insist on sending you this email over a programmatic SMTP connection hooked into my normal Jekyll publishing flow.

Time to learn how to send an HTML email.

mwunsch.github.io: 7807f3277fbcc2e02e9291f065507c13abcd7cd1

When looking for help (via Google of course) for writing a raw text buffer to send over SMTP, I could not find a lot out there. Unlike web development, there doesn’t seem to be a supporting industry for email development. Most searches ended up at libraries and frameworks in various languages designed to produce the message. I’m trying to minimize dependencies here. Since all I have is Net::SMTP I turned to the original source for learning about sending HTML email: the spec. RFC 2045 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

The multipart/alternative Content-Type is used and specifies a boundary string to distinguish between the alternate implementations of the email. The Jekyll Post object calls its Convertible#transform method to transform the Markdown into HTML and that is what’s sent along through SMTP. A fresh, handwrought, artisinal HTML email is delivered to your door.

mwunsch.github.io: 0a57a982be12e00b6e110c0075ce0f5b61eb7bdf

This commit is an adjustment to my Tumblelog/Tumblr syndication system to support Tumblr’s link-type posts. I wanted to publish a Link on Tumblr to my TinyLetter sign-up page.

mwunsch.github.io: 36d723f5c415cfa32574beb380d0515f68175277

I think owning the content you create on the web is important. That’s why I have built my personal site to be a POSSE system. When trying to publish the above article, I was getting an error from the Tumblr API. When my syndication hook encountered the error, it aborted the process. That meant that when the Tumblr API is in a bad state it prevents me from git pushing. I altered that code to ignore Tumblr errors. I was able to publish this blog post to my personal site, knowing that whenever the Tumblr API behaved as expected again I could post over it. There’s plenty of internet media hand-wringing when it comes to Medium or Twitter’s existential crisis about being a Publisher or a Platform. I’m a publisher, and I decided to build my own platform and syndicate my work outword to others. When inevitably the Platform side of these businesses get the short shrift, it helps to be have a home base to work from.

Eventually, I was able to publish this post to Tumblr after filing a support ticket.

emacs.d: f5bb19fee0589ec43853455086fa52b64715229f

I set my default ERC quit message to be the Waving Hand Sign Emoji with the Emoji Modifier Fitzpatrick Type-3. Unicode is neat.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this newsletter and the code I present. Please let me know by replying to this email or by mentioning @markwunsch on Twitter. If you appreciate it, please tell your friends to subscribe!

Until next time,
👋🏼 Mark