The LGF feature that lets you email a copy of one of our posts to a friend has been the latest target of the extreme lizard makeover project. It will now send a nicely formatted HTML email, with a plain text version included for non-HTML email clients or people who disable HTML email entirely.

(I’m thinking of allowing pictures to be included in these HTML emails, but a bit concerned about the increased load on our SMTP server.)

Check it out, and let me know if you have any problems. It’s been tested with several popular email clients without a hitch…

UPDATE at 12/7/06 6:31:39 pm:

I’ve discovered that the best way to send HTML email is the caveman method: tables and inline CSS code with the ‘style’ attribute. Old school. Here’s a good article about it: How to Code HTML Email Newsletters.

I also discovered that attaching images and displaying them in the HTML is problematic in many email clients, not least of them Google Mail. So I’ve modified the code; now the images link back to the originals on the LGF server.

And … I’ve also changed the code so that embedded images in LGF posts will now be included in your emails—not the images themselves (as attachments) but links back to our site. (Previously, you would see ‘[Image not shown]’.)

If you use Google Mail, set it to always allow images from LGF, and you’ll be riding in style.