New and noteworthy for 4/7/09
Widgets & RSS FeedsEmail client popularity: Campaign Monitor analyzed more than 250 million opens from its own mailings over the last six months. They calculated the relative popularity of email clients, which could be very useful when trying to decide which email clients are most important to target for compatibility and to test against. The data comes with a very large caveat as it can only take into account mail clients that display images. A number of popular clients such as Outlook 2007 and Gmail block images by default.
Mobile Device Detection for the Masses: John Boxall has an intriguing solution for detecting when a visitor to the web site may be using a mobile browser. His technique is novel. It involves first detecting for known desktop browser User-Agents, which is much easier as there are a very large number of mobile device User-Agents. Then algorithm it attempts to identify mobile devices that have full featured browsers such as on the iPhone and Android phones and various bots. What is left is typically the majority of mobile devices. This technique is useful for quickly determining when to serve a mobile version of a web page.
Where the world’s first transatlantic email was sent from: The FeraLabs blog has an interesting bit of historical research tracking down information on the building where the first transatlantic email originated. The message was sent by Dick Grimsdale from the University of Sussex in September 1973 to the United States. Unfortunately the research does not include additional information about where the message was sent.
