Tag: Email

How to Disable WordPress Emojis
First off, I didn’t write this. Ryan Hellyer did. I only came across this fix from a post written by Justin Downey. The short-end of it is, drop this block of code into the bottom of your functions.php file. I made some tiny tweaks:
```
if (!function_exists('disable_emojis')) {
  function disable_emojis() {
    remove_action( 'wp_head', 'print_emoji_detection_script', 7 );
    remove_action( 'admin_print_scripts', 'print_emoji_detection_script' );
    remove_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles' );
    remove_action( 'admin_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles' );
    remove_filter( 'the_content_feed', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );
    remove_filter( 'comment_text_rss', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );
    remove_filter( 'wp_mail', 'wp_staticize_emoji_for_email' );
  }
  add_action( 'init', 'disable_emojis' );
}
```
I really needed this personally, because MailChimp was parsing my RSS feed verbatim, and for whatever reason, when WordPress added Twemoji to core in 4.2 it forces the emoji markup to be an inline-image — which, I get it. It’s useful for older devices who may not support emoji. But it was completely wrecking my email campaigns styles, yuck! ????

Thankfully, this function works in disabling the Twemoji images altogether! Tested up to: 5.2.2 ????
July 4, 2019
Twilio to Acquire SendGrid

From Twilio:

“Increasingly, our customers are asking us to solve all of their strategic communications challenges – regardless of channel. Email is a vital communications channel for companies around the world, and so it was important to us to include this capability in our platform,” said Jeff Lawson, Twilio’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “The two companies share the same vision, the same model, and the same values. We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring together the two leading developer-focused communications platforms to create the unquestioned platform of choice for all companies looking to transform their customer engagement.”

I’ve used SendGrid in the past for various email-related projects, and it’s an effective product, don’t get me wrong. There’s just something a bit unwieldy about a single company having so much control over email and SMS mass-marketing tech (this quickly). My skepticism is outweighed by optimism. Even despite their all-stock transaction, which if you ask me is a total miser move. Seeing as it’s 100% not taxable, not a cool move. But I get it, you gotta save money, to raise money, to pay back the VC’s, and make shareholders happy. I’m by no means justifying the move either, it’s just another disappointing tax-dodge. *sighs*

On the other hand, this could end up being a very positive investment for Twilio in the long-run of things. Twilio is already essentially a Mailchimp for SMS company. SendGrid is fantastic email-product and their API’s are rock solid. I suppose this acquisition is pretty telling. Twilio just wants to be the de facto omni-channel solution provider. Let’s see how this plays out ????

October 16, 2018
The Origin of the Tag

I love coming across this stuff. I always forget that Marc Andreessen is basically the father of Mosiac, Netscape and plenty of other internet startups through his VC, Andreessen Horowitz.

Here’s Andreessen’s super-duper casual proposal over email, sent on February 25, 1993:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

Lovely. Marc goes forward to say that browsers should support bitmap image filetypes, be flexible and recommends browser behavior when an <img> has been given a non-supported filetype in the src argument:

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they
support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a
browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants
instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

Amazing to see how far we’ve come since then.

September 14, 2018