Or, why styling templates should be considered a form of torture and forbidden by the Geneva Conventions! email A friend of mine told me that there are a lot of people frequently checking government websites to see if there are any changes that concern them. I decided to add this as a functionality of as well. BirdOfKnowledge The ideas was simple -> the user inputs a website that they want to track and the interval they want to track it in, with a half an hour as a minimum. Crawl the webpage, extract the meaningful content, check if there are difference to previous versions, send email to user. Boy, was I wrong… The government websites, at least here in Bulgaria have a very interesting structure (which is **** ). Oddly enough I managed to achieve extracting meaningful data from government websites within a few hours. I also found a third party library that can generate difference between two strings, which I would use when I send emails. It looked like this. version 0.1 Then I only had to send emails. ONLY! It turns out that styling emails for different mail providers is extremely old fashioned. Keep in mind that I am 24 years old. I have no experience in making websites entirely out of tables to fit perfectly into browsers. I use tables when I want to represent visual data. Styling emails is like coding the visual part of a website for something around the year 2000 +/- a few years. It took me some time to find free templates and even more time (roughly around an hour) to decipher the template, delete all of the parts that I didn’t need and modify the parts that I needed. In the end I was left with this, which for a Beta version is alright, I guess. Despite that it looks very simple it is a bunch of tables, table rows, tds, and tables in tds and so on, until the email client decide to render simple squares with flat backgrounds. Next I will write about the state of different search APIs and why I don’t use them and still manage to crawl the web tomorrow :) Prologue This functionality is live and being used by a few people! Which means that my pain was not in vain! If you are a participant in the I would love to hear your impressions of the hackathon and this article and whether or not our so far had anything similar. hackathon journeys The previous articles can be found here: https://medium.com/@k_ivanow And of course anyone is more than welcomed to subscribe for Gamayun here — , test it, tweet to it and whatever else you can think of :) https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/gamayun
