 |
Net Nerds
Holiday Greeting Cards by Susan Ives, Alamo PC |
|
Net Nerds
Holiday Greeting Cards by Susan Ives, Alamo PC |
| Send electronic greeting cards to your e-mail buddies.
Why pay the Post Office to mail holiday greeting cards when you can send the electronically, for free? No stamps, no dead trees, no writer's cramp, no worrying about slow delivery. The best-known e-card site is Blue Mountain Arts, the ninth most popular site on the Internet. They have hundreds of cards, including ones for Christmas, Hannaukah and Ramadan, Kwanzaa, New Year and Y2K. You can get them in Italiano , Français, Español, Deutsch , Portuguêse , Korean, Japanese and Chinese. There are cards for every occasion, including a section of wacky holidays - we missed "blame someone else day," August 13th, but it will be marked in big red letters on next year's calendar. Most cards contain animations and all can be personalized. Most cards work the same way. You look at a catalog of cards and preview the one you want. You fill out a form, including your and the sender's e-mail address, a message and maybe even some additional customization, such as colors or fonts. Click "send" and it's gone. Minutes later, the recipient will get an e-mail message advising him or her that you have send an electronic greeting. The message contains a link back to the card site, where they go to claim the card. Since the card itself is never delivered to the recipient's mailbox, there is no danger of them getting a virus or experiencing a clogged mailbox. Blue Mountain cards are actually protected by a court order. In January, a Judge granted a preliminary injunction against Microsoft to protect the delivery of Blue Mountain electronic greeting cards. Blue Mountain said, 'In November of 1998 Blue Mountain Arts discovered evidence that a number of personalized Blue Mountain electronic greeting cards had been diverted to junk mail trash by Microsoft Corporation. Blue Mountain voiced strong objections to Microsoft over this conduct to no avail. In addition, some Blue Mountain cards were blocked by Microsoft's WebTV Networks, so, on December 8,1998, Blue Mountain filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and its subsidiary WebTV."There was also a rumor circulating that you could get a virus from electronic cards. This is not true. An explanation is on the Symantec web site, www.symantec.com/press/1999/n990311b.html. Hallmark also has an excellent greeting card site. There are dozens of holiday cards, from the silly to the sacred. Although they don't carry special holiday cards, the State of Texas has a great postcard collection. You could personalize them with a holiday message. Holiday E-Mail Stationery Many e-mail programs allow you to use "stationery," which is a background image and compatible font. Outlook Express, which comes bundled with Windows 98, has stationery built into it, including some holiday themes. If you are using a different e-mail program, check the help file to see if you can use stationery or a template or add a background image. To use stationery in Outlook Express: Next to the "New Mail" button on the toolbar is a skinny little down arrow. Click on this, and then "select stationery." A list of available themes will pop up. Select one and it will automatically be applied to your next message. To make stationery for Outlook Express: Stationery is just a HTML file - a mini web page. A sample of the code is: <html><head> <style>body {margin-left: 240; font-family: Lucida Casual; font-size: 12pt; color: #002f2f; font-weight: bold; } </style> </head> <body BACKGROUND="tree.jpg" bgCOLOR="#ffffff"> </body> </html>To deconstruct this: The margin data shifts the text to the right to accommodate a graphic border on the left edge of the screen. You might have to experiment to get the number of pixels right. The font is fairly self-explanatory, but remember that the person receiving the message must have this font installed on his or her computer, too, so be conservative in your choice or it may default to Times Roman. The graphic in the body tag is the background graphic, which will be tiled. Save this as a .HTML file and place it and the graphic in this folder in your hard drive: C:\ProgramFiles\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery. It is then available for your use. If you are using Outlook Express ver. 5 the process is even easier. It contains a stationery Wizard that walks you through the process with a point-and-click interface. The stationery Wizard is under that little skinny arrow; again, choose "select stationery" but then click on the "create new" button and follow the instructions. If you need graphics for your e-mail stationery or web site, there is a ton of it available as free downloads. A great place to start looking is the Graphics Ring Holiday Sites list. They list more than 50 different sites that offer holiday graphics, many of them unique and attractive. Most are in GIF or JPG format at a low resolution geared towards screen viewing, so they won't transfer well to print. You will want to use those labeled "background images" if you use them for stationery. Download some additional stationery: You can download free, pre-made stationery sets from the Internet. A good source is Athenea's Designer Graphics. She includes instructions for downloading and installing them. Susan Ives is a past president of Alamo PC. You can send your e-card or e-mail with holiday stationery to her at suives@texas.net |