inluminent

I read all of MarketingSherpa’s email newsletters religiously. Over the past month or two, they’ve proven to be just about the absolute best resource for new ideas that I have been able to find (and because they’re newsletters, I don’t have to continually search them out).

In the recent past, I’ve learned about ways that the SF Gate is increasing their advertising revenue, how to get famous, how the NYTimes makes more money on their content, and most recently how IBM transformed their website from old and stodgy, to useful and pertinent (not online yet).

That being said, they publish about 8 newsletters on a weekly/bi-weekly basis or so. They’re absolutely wonderful, but they always seem to have some weird little typographic issue. I sent Anne Holand, the publisher, a quick email about it, and she’s thankfully decided to look into the issue. They should be using TextSoap sometime soon, so that their non-ascii email becomes an ascii standard publication. It’ll help them now, and in the future I think.

The main issue is that curly quotes don’t stay curly quotes across platforms (windows vs. mac that is). It just doesn’t work. Typographers would kill me for saying this, but if you’re publishing an email newsletter that’s text only, and your targeting the marketing world, it’s probably worth it to make it work well on Macs and PCs. A lot of marketing professionals still use old Macs, and a lot more will in the future (that’s just my hope). If you’re making an HTML newsletter, then please use the HTML codes for curly quotes, as it’ll just plain be ‘more right’.

In HTML it would look like this:

“Who’re you?” becomes:

“Who’re you?” (but that’s a bitch isn’t it?)

So, download TextSoap if you use a PC, and publish an email, now! If you’re on a Mac, you still might be interested, if you don’t already own BBEdit. It’s also a great compliment to BBEdit in some cases.