Outlook Express Other programs Subject etc Customise card Images
Titles Attachments Background sound Selected image Findsame/

Musical e-cards

Outlook Express

The musical e-cards are made in the format used for Outlook Express stationery (file extension .eml).

If your recipient has Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, they may well hear the tune playing immediately when they view the card.

Users of other e-mail clients probably will need to click on the attachment to hear it. I've tried the methods that are used to play background sounds for Opera and Netscape, but though they work well for web pages, they don't seem to work in e-mails. Of course be sure to tell me if you find a method that does work!

Most recipients will be able to hear the attachments, but some Mac users can't recieve attachments in base64 format, which is the format used.

You can also visit Music And Virtual Flowers web site and make a musical e-card on-line from a selection of midi clips of fractal tunes - it is in a similar format to the card with border. Anyone who can hear music on their web browser will be able to hear these cards.

You can find some nice .eml stationery on the web - take a look at http://sneugle.virtualave.net/.

Warning: this is one of the file types that can be infected with viruses, so one should be careful about where one downloads them from, and be sure to have a virus scanner installed with up to date virus definitions.

I don't know of any web site or program that does e-mail stationery with background sound - it may be an FTS first :-).

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What to do if you use another e-mail program

If you use another type of program (most other e-mail programs), then you probably won't be able to use the .eml version of the card, but can still see and hear the card as a web page.

To make the web pages, select Views | Play Fractal Tune | E-card Config | Picture and Tune | Open as html in browser. and make the card as usual.

You can make a zip of the card and send that instead. The most recent e-card web page gets copied into the folder:

e-cards\most_recent_e-card_web_page\e-card

Contents of this folder are deleted each time a new card is made. If you have backups selected (= default), backups of all the e-cards sent are kept in the e-cards\new_cards folder.

Outlook Express may pop up anyway when you make the e-mail even if it isn't your default e-mail client, as it will probably still be the program associated with stationery in this format. If you prefer not to see it when you make teh card, unselect Picture and Tune | Open .eml file (Outlook Express format). Or to open the .eml file in another program, if you can find one that uses the format, enter it's path in the Picture and Tune | E-mail program box.

You can also visit my Tunes And Virtual Flowers web site and make a musical e-card on-line. This is the most flexible option, for receiving the cards as well as sending them, as anyone who can browse web pages and hear the background sound to web pages will be able to hear the background sound for your card. However, you have somewhat less control over the layout of the card, and you can't yet upload your own midi files or images to send (but maybe this will be possible later)

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Subject etc fields

By default, the card shows up in Outlook Express with the subject, from, to, Cc and Bcc fields all blank.

To pre-select them, edit the fields in Views | Play Fractal Tune | E-card Config | To...

You can also use this window to send an e-card to everyone in a list of addresses. The csv format is the one you get if you export an address book from OE in text format - select the name and the address fields for export only. It's intended for short lists of addresses - click Okay after each one.

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Customise layout

To customise the layout, edit card.htm, or for the one with a border, card_with_border.htm. For the stationery, edit stationery.htm.

These are in html format, but with some fields left to be filled in by FTS. You can edit the templates in your web page designer or in a text editor.

Leave the fonts and the background and text colours exactly as they are - they get replaced by the custom colours when the card is made.

Here is how it works:

Verdana gets replaced eveywhere by the font family you choose from Views | Play Fractal Tune | E-card Config | Picture and Tune | Font family

#00BFFF or DeepSkyBlue gets replaced by the picture colour

#FFFAF0 or FloralWhite by the background colour

#9932CC or DarkOrchid by the text colour.

It's done this way so that the files are all valid html, and can be edited in a normal html editor. You can include images as these use SRC="...", or background=".." fields - they will get added to the e-mail body automatically.

Other types of links such as href="..." are not added to the e-mail - your recipient won't be able to hear or see them unless they already have the files or can access them on-line.

To customise the cards that include a 3D attachment, edit the ones with the suffix _3d: card_3d.htm, card_with_border_3d.htm, and stationery_3d.htm.

You can use card_3d_for_web_page_only.htm too, but this one doesn't work in OE, it only makes the web page. It makes a card with the 3D flower on the left and the text on the right, with the music in the background as usual.

For those who prefer to edit the source: you can use find/fontfamily instead of Verdana for the font family chosen by the user, find/textcolor instead of #9932CC , find/backgroundcolor instead of #FFFAF0, and find/picturecolor instead of #00BFFF.

If you want fts to leave the #00BFFF etc as it is in the body of the html, e.g. because you want to use DeepSkyBlue etc for something else, add a comment <-- find/color --> to the head of the html file, and fts will only substitute the colours when it finds find/textcolor etc. For the font family, add a comment <-- find/fontfamily -->. Of course, find/textcolor isn't a valid value for the text colour attribute, so this method is only suitable for those who work with the source code for the page.

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Images

To add a particular image you use the usual method:

<IMG SRC="buttercups.gif" ALT="buttercups">

Since this uses a src="" type field already, the image will get included in the body of the message.

You can use icon.gif for the fts icon, and koch_snowflake_light.gif for the koch snowflake.

Use SRC="image" for the randomly selected image.

I have added a selection of gifs of 3D flowers made in my VRML trees beta (soon to be released). Chooses from all of the images except the gif of the Fractal Tune Smithy icon (icon.gif), and the koch snowflake background (koch_snowflake_light.gif).

See also Selected image.

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Titles

To include the title for the fractal tune anywhere in the html page use find/tunetitle

Use find/title to make a title from the random image file name by removing the extension and changing any underlines to spaces.

Like this:

<IMG SRC="image" ALT="find/title">

Place it after the SRC="image" in the html.

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Attachments

To send a file as an attachment rather than as part of the message, add it in as a comment.

This add the current tune smithy file as an attachment:

<!-- SRC="find/tune.ts:1" This is an attachment -->

The :1 tells fts to mark the file as an attachment rather than an inline file in the e-mail.

To send it both ways - inlined and as an attachment - add a :2 at the end of the file name in SRC="...":

<IMG SRC="image.gif:2">

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Background sound

To add the tune as background sound to the card, add a line

<!--find/bgsound-->

after the body tag.

This stands in for two versions of the background sound, one for the web page and one for the e-mails. Also either version can be looped or unlooped depending on what the creator of the card chooses, and if the author chooses to have no sound at all, then it gets left out altogether.

Alternatively, include the background sound tag in the template. You can use src="tune" for the tune selected by the user. The selection of looped / unlooped etc is then up to the author of the html template. - you need to do separate html templates for all the options you want.

The tag that seems to work best for the e-mails is:

<BGSOUND SRC="tune" LOOP=infinite>

It only works with OE + IE and some setups. There is a much better version that works with all the main web browsers for web pages, but this doesn't seem to work at all in e-mails, so FTS uses it only for the html file.

This is the web page script:

<!-- script modified from http://home.worldonline.dk/petermad/sound/index-uk.htm#javascript -->
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript">
  <!--
  if(navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera") < 0)
    document.writeln ('<EMBED SRC="tune" AUTOSTART="true" HIDDEN="true" LOOP="true">');
  else
    document.write('<BGSOUND SRC="tune" LOOP=infinite>');
  // -->
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
  <EMBED SRC="tune" AUTOSTART="true" HIDDEN="true" height="2" width="2" LOOP="true"></EMBED>
  <NOEMBED><BGSOUND SRC="tune" LOOP=infinite></NOEMBED>
</NOSCRIPT>

Include that in your template if you'd like to have a go at tweaking it to see if you can get it to work with e-mails for anything else apart from OE.

I find that it doesn't even work for OE as shown for some reason - not sure which of these tags it is that confuses it. The e-mails look okay until you send them, and they get sent with two attachments and no background sound.

Note the LOOP="infinite" and LOOP="true" - if you want the clip to play once only when the card is opened, then remove these.

The reason for all the complexity is that Netscape recognises the <EMBED> tag for background sound, and not the <BGSOUND> tag, Internet Explorer is the other way round, and Opera recognises both. With Opera, since it supports both approaches, you need to take care that you don't get two copies of the clip playing simultaneously.

Also Opera has an option to identify itself as Netscape in the AppName field, and some users may have selected that in order to use Opera to veiw pages that were designed for Netscape. This means you can't rely on navigator.appName on its own. If you use navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera") you'll get a negative number if it really is Netscape.

Finally, in any of those browsers, the user may have switched off javascript, so the <NOSCRIPT> version deals with that. Opera will skip the <BGSOUND> part there because it is within <NOEMBED> </NOEMBED> tags.

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Selected image

If you choose Views | Play Fractal Tune | E-card Config | Picture and Tune | Select image, then the image you choose gets used instead of the random image selection.

Wherever the template has src="image", it now gets replaced by a link to the selected image.

This means one can use the same template to show a random image and a selected image, depending on what you want to do when you send the e-mail.

The selected image can be anywhere on your file system, and before it gets sent, it gets copied into e-cards\new_cards\.

This is to ensure that all the urls in the html version of the card are relative.

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findsame/

Use findsame/*.ext to find the same file as before but with extension .ext instead of the one it had before.

This is used for the .wrl files in emails with the 3D attachments - if you immediately follow the

<IMG src="image">

with

<!-- src="findsame/*.wrl>

Then for example, if daisy.gif is the random gif, then this finds daisy.wrl

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