Thanks NYT!

So I’m a happily married man, and my wife tells me she’s a happily married woman. Nonetheless I still have man wedding knowledge to share so I intend to keep this series going for a few more posts. So stay tuned and I’ll write something soon. I’m thinking a post about ceremony venue shopping to follow up on my previous one about wedding reception venues. Got a better idea? Please let me know. I like to write about what people want to hear.

Digitally printed calla wedding invitation in color steel on cream paper

Letterpress is hard to beat in terms of look and feel. You really can’t replicate the tactile experience digitally. We admit, however, that letterpress wedding invitations are a pricey investment. That’s why I thought it was a smart move of Leslie to mix up her invitations for her dual-event wedding celebration. She kept the top-of-the-line letterpress for the smaller destination wedding and used the still-terrific-but-easier-on-the-wallet digital prints for the larger hometown wedding reception. I think she struck a nice balance between the two affairs, and tied them together easily by sticking with the same design. Her guests seemed to agree because I heard nothing but good things from Leslie and others at the party!

Are you looking for digital or letterpress invitations for your hometown wedding reception? Check out our hybrid invitations and pair beautiful prints with online maps and RSVP.

Incoming search terms:

• dayton ohio wedding invitations

Simple enough, right? A pretty common need. I thought it would be easy to find an example online that I could use. Turns out there are tons of examples, but few work! It took me awhile but I eventually cobbled together a useable config.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name localhost;
  root /var/www/maintenance;

  error_page 503 /index.html;

  location /index.html {
    # show page
  }

  location / {
    return 503;
  }
}

Dead simple once you get it. Every incoming request is served index.html (the maintenance page) and receives a 503 status code. This works with Nginx 0.7.65.

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Ginkgo wedding invitation design printed digitally on pearl paper.

I’m especially fond of the RSVP website that accompanies all ginkgo Mightyvites. The background pattern we use looks great on screen. Speaking of RSVP websites, Larry & Anke included a custom domain with their invitation order. With a custom domain guests reply to their invitation at a web address of their host’s choosing, plus all Mightyvites branding is removed from the RSVP website. In this case Anke & Larry went with ankeandlarry.com. Custom domains are a nice touch we offer customers so they can give their guests a truly personalized and unique invitation experience.

Lovely invites for a lovely couple. A long overdue congrats to Anke & Larry!

Are you looking for ginkgo electronic wedding invitations? Check out our hybrid invitations! They’re both printed and online.

Incoming search terms:

• invitation background patterns
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No, it didn’t take me a year to do the upgrade. Shortly after I wrote that post I took a full time Rails job. Then my business got busy with paying customers. Then I got engaged and a few months later married. There were a lot of distractions which kept throwing me off my Ruby On Rails upgrade plans. I did do it though. In fact I completed two Rails upgrades this summer. One for mightyvites.com and one for my employer. In both cases I transitioned webapps from Rails 2.x to Rails 3.0.10 and introduced Ruby 1.9.2. Doing so was definitely worth it. Rails 3 feels so much more mature than previous releases. The upgrade, however, was not easy. Below are the issues I had to deal with to make it happen.

Changes in Rails

• The Rails.root/lib directory must be autoloaded
• My use of JRails could be dropped due to the new UJS approach of JavaScript handling
• #fields_for and #form_for require <%= ERB blocks
• @controller was deprecated for #controller
• ApplicationController#filter_parameter_logging is now config.filter_parameters in application.rb
• Must mark application HTML as html_safe due to XSS protection being the default
• No more CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie (because of signed cookies?)
• #rescue_action_in_public usage changed to #rescue_from (really a Rails 2.3 change)
• Awful “You have a model in a subdirectory, where the name of the subdirectory matches the name of the model.” problem (succinct explanation (point 4), technical explanation)
• Terrible “incompatible encoding regexp match (UTF-8 regexp with ASCII-8BIT string) (Encoding::CompatibilityError)” problem caused by rendering XLS file with render :file =>. Fixed by using #send_file
• ActiveRecord attributes with errors are displayed in a form_for with CSS class ‘field_with_errors’ as opposed to the preveious ‘fieldWithErrors’
• Had to uncomment the Nginx version of config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header in production.rb

Changes in Ruby gems

• will_paginate needs 3.0.pre2
• mysql2 needs 0.2.11
• had to encode DB to UTF8. Apparently mysql gem would change encoding to UTF8 while mysql2 gem does not?
• hominid needs 2.1.9
• rmagick required building ImageMagick via MacPorts w/o openmp support (CaptainPete’s explanation)

Changes in Ruby

• Array#choice now #sample
• YAML lib changes to Psych; can no longer handle ypaths with #select
• Drop use of FasterCSV because it is now the native CSV

I would say the average time it took for me to do each upgrade was 3 weeks. A full test suite was invaluable in tracking the state of the upgrade, and after launch I inevitably found bits of un-html_safe’d output. I released the Rails 3 upgrade of mightyvites.com in September of ’11. Since then I’ve upgraded the site to Rails 3.1 and instituted the new asset pipeline. Hopefully I’ll write about that sooner rather than later.

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Kelly and her groom had their wedding invitations and matching enclosures digitally printed on cream paper in colors lilac and ebony. In addition to a standard Mightyvite the happy couple also chose to have their wedding invitations sent to their guests via our mail service. For little more than the cost of postage we stamped and sent each invitation and enclosure on Kevin & Kelly’s behalf. As with all Mightyvites we addressed the envelopes and RSVPs were handled online at a website that matched the wedding invitations in design.

No doubt this California couple had fantastic invites for their wedding day. Congratulations Kevin & Kelly!

Are you looking for nature themed invitations for your wedding or other special event? Be sure to checkout Mightyvites! We have many designs for you to consider.

Incoming search terms:

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Recently the time came for me to spruce up the emails mightyvites.com sends. I wanted slick-looking HTML that looks good in all email clients, makes it to users’ inboxes, is multipart, and can be tracked. In addition the email templates should be easy for non-geeks to edit. That way they can be changed often and not always by me.

I’m a fan of MailChimp. We use their (robust) API to programmatically manage our newsletter subscriber list. They make it very easy to compose, send, and track well-designed HTML email. They do not, however, make it easy to send transactional email. That’s not their niche so they don’t cater to it ¹. There is a work around, but it leaves much to be desired. MailChimp transactional emails must include unsubscribe links and other CAN-SPAM compliance content which is just out of place on notices like forgotten password emails. The MailChimp email composer, however, is pretty sweet. It’s easy to use and generates cross-client compatible HTML email complete with text versions for multi-part. The composer was perfect for my needs, but sending through MailChimp was no good because doing so automatically adds the unwanted mailing list links. Then it hit me: if I could compose and save my emails in MailChimp and later export them I could include the export in my Rails app and send through the email provider of my choice. Possible? With hominid, the MailChimp API Ruby gem, yes.

Hominid wraps the well documented MailChimp API for use in Ruby applications. It adds the syntactic sugar most Rubyists would expect and pretty much does a 1 to 1 mapping of the methods MailChimp defines. Part of the API deals with what MailChimp calls templates. Templates are reusable emails that you create at mailchimp.com and save to your account. You can access these HTML templates through the API and run them through a method to generate a text version. With both a HTML and text version “in hand” you can write the output to disk and have what you need for ActionMailer to generate fancy, multi-part emails that were edited online with MailChimp’s slick editor. I keep all this action in a Rake task which I run every time I update a template at MailChimp.

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  desc "Task to pull customer email templates from MailChimp and cache them in the app"
  task :import_email_templates => :environment do
    # Maintain a map of ActionMailer methods to MailChimp
    # template names in a YAML file. YAML looks like:
    # <mailer class name>:
    #   <mailer method name>: <name of MailChimp template used by method>
    # Example:
    # user_mailer:
    #   signed_up: "Welcome To Mightyvites"
    #   ...
    map=YAML.load_file(MAILER_TEMPLATE_YAML)
    api=Hominid::API.new(MAILCHIMP_API_KEY)
 
    # loop through the list of known MailChimp template names
    api.templates['user'].each do |template|
      html_cache=nil
 
      # find the mailer class and method this template belongs to
      map.each do |mailer, emails|
        template_name=emails.invert[template['name']]
 
        if template_name
          html_cache=File.join(Rails.application.config.view_path, mailer.to_s, "#{template_name}.html.erb")
          break
        end
      end
 
      next unless File.exist?(html_cache)
 
      # pull the latest HTML templates from MailChimp
      html=api.template_info(template['id'].to_i)['source']
 
      # create a text version of the HTML for multi-part mail
      text=api.generate_text('html', html)
 
      # inline all CSS to ensure greatest email client compatibility
      html=api.inline_css(html)
 
      # overwrite mailer views
      File.open(html_cache, 'w+') {|f| f << html }
      text_cache=html_cache.gsub('.html.erb', '.text.erb')
      File.open(text_cache, 'w+') {|f| f << text }
    end
  end

With that code I can easily update my application’s mail templates and manage them at MailChimp. My templates don’t change often so I keep the update manual, but you could set up a cron job to pull in changes nightly, or create a Capistrano task to pull in a fresh copy with each application deployment.

So what about tracking? That was the last wish on my list and was easily gotten with a nifty SMTP service called SendGrid. Goodbye Gmail! SendGrid works extra hard to give my application a high email delivery rate and it provides a nice web interface for viewing all email sends, clicks, bounces, etc. SendGrid’s tracking isn’t as slick as MailChimp’s, but it’s a heck of a lot better than nothing. Overall I’ve been very pleased with SendGrid’s service, and happy as a clam with my MailChimp’d ActionMailer templates.

Incoming search terms:

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Simple wedding invitation and thank you card

Since we first announced simple it has been one of the hottest designs in the gallery. I think folks like it because it is so…simple! That design matched with the right colors tends to always look great in print no matter if it’s wedding invitations, save the dates, or thank you cards.

Nice choice, Mike & Audrey! And a long overdue congrats.

Are you looking for simple wedding invitations? Use the simple design or another and go hybrid with digital or letterpress prints!

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• SIMPLE THANK YOU NOTES
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Chicago-themed wedding invitation with matching place cards

We were thankful for the opportunity to create an invitation for our favorite bartender’s wedding. Not only did we get to make something unique for Cole & Sara but their design brought a much-needed addition to the Mightyvites gallery: a Chicago-themed invitation. Recently we added the design to the gallery under the name Skyline, so now any Chicago-loving customer can choose it for their big day.

Chicago skyline invitation

Skyline is a 4″x9″ invitation and is available in both letterpress and digital print. The gallery version shows the design in colors frost and midnight but customers can alter the invitation with colors of their own choosing. As with all Mightyvites a matching RSVP website is included with each purchase and matching save the dates, place cards, and/or thank you cards can be made.

Chicago skyline RSVP website

Big congrats to Cole & Sara on their recent nuptials. Be sure to pass on good wishes next time you’re in Logan Squre by stopping at Cole’s for a drink. Who knows, you might run into Steph and I, in which case hit us up for some wedding invitation talk.

Are you looking for a Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or other city themed wedding invitation? If so drop us a line so we can help you find the perfect design.

Incoming search terms:

• chicago skyline wedding invitations
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