The server for the new Lantern website is not yet ready, so I’ve been working on other things, specifically the template for the email news blast, and a tool to help editors author it.

Along the way, I’ve brushed up on my CSS and HTML, and have picked up a bit of PHP and jQuery from Codecademy. My progress can be seen on my Codecademy profile.

The tool I’m working on for authoring the email blast has form and some functions. It has the option to create an arbitrary number of stories, and then use those to generate the HTML of an email to be fed into OCIO’s Bulkmail system.

So far, the generation is the problem. I’m getting better at JavaScript and jQuery, but I suspect that I shall end up taking the Codecademy JavaScript course.

I’ve also learned about and made use of the Twitter Bootstrap CSS library in my email template tool.