SanfordWhiteman

Paging through my CodePen demos, I always find techniques that never got their own blog post. Here’s one that deserves a promotion. You may not have thought about it, but native HTML date fields — — don’t support custom placeholder text. They either display a date pattern by default (left image) o...

Recently got confirmation that a very large German ISP still doesn’t like tracked links in Marketo emails. By “doesn’t like” I mean their webmail totally chokes and displays the (partial) source code: This has been the case for at least a year, probably forever. Bugs happen, obviously, and bugs get ...

I can hear your inner thoughts: “Don’t do what now? Marketo already enforces the rule that two programs can’t have the same name (at the same point in time).” Ah, but that rule isn’t as strict as you think. You can create a program with a nested program of exactly the same name, though I dearly wish...

Being paranoid about encoding — URL encoding, HTML encoding, UTF-8 encoding, any encoding — helps avoid uncomfortable post-mortems. But here’s one type of apparent encoding bug that’s actually a false alarm. Been working with a client on a complex Marketo form localization project, where pretty much...

Interesting thread over in the Products discussion area, where user DN asked: I am trying to create an unsubscribe form that has various values for the reason someone is unsubscribing.For example: “I no longer want to receive these emails,” “The emails are too frequent,” “I never signed up for this ...

Some apps (but not Marketo) are far too open-minded about underscores in host names. Here’s one SaaS setup guide saying underscores aren’t “web best practice,” but allowing them anyway: Needlessly vague, since the underscore in mobile_conference has predictable consequences for this particular app. ...

Know what you don’t want every recipient seeing if they click your CTA? A completely blank screen with the URL stuck on the tracking link: And you don’t want them seeing this (non-bypassable) security warning if they check their F12 Console, either: How did we get here? The cause is a conflict betwe...

A client gets regular uploads of quarterly sales data into Marketo custom objects. They send a “your recent activity” email to customers when each quarter ends or a few days after that (could be the first or second weekday of the next month). The email must include the exact quarter end date: “These...