This repository contains a HTML email template for Frontiers Fortnightly and a script (render.py) to render the template. The resultant file (if using the genmime command implemented in render.py) is the source of an email which is complete except for the To: field. It is intended that this email source will be loaded into an email client and sent to members of the Maker Club by whoever ends up distributing Frontiers Fortnightly.

Privacy note: Whoever distributes the email needs to remember to put all recipients in the BCC field (if using a desktop client) or to send the email with only individual recipients in to To: field (i.e. so that it always looks like you're the only recipient). It's easy to forget to do this, and very annoying when your email gets leaked (and possibly spammed) because someone pasted a bunch of addresses into the To: field in Outlook when doing a bulk mailing.

To run the script, you will first need to install its dependencies, listed in requirements.txt. The easiest way to do this is using pip and virtualenv. For instance, on Ubuntu you might do:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-virtualenv
$ cd <path to this repository>
$ virtualenv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
...some junk, possibly dependency errors which you'll need to Google to
resolve...
$ ./render.py --help  # Shows usage of rendering script
$ ./render.py --dest to-send.eml genmime issues/issue-7.md  # Render issue 7

You might also need to install some extra packages like lxml for the install to work correctly; Googling any errors that come up during pip install will yield the answers you seek. In particular, you might need to sudo apt-get build-dep python3-lxml to install the dependencies of Python's lxml library, and sudo apt-get install python3-dev to install Python-relevant header files needed by most large libraries on PyPI.

The source issues themselves are stored in Markdown format in the issues/ directory. Remember to follow the existing issues closely when structuring new issues: issues should always begin with a metadata block containing an "Issue:" key with the issue number; the issue block should be followed by a blank line, then the preamble; stories should follow afterwards, with each story beginning with a level-one header in the form # <heading> and end with a [Learn more](...) URL.

To resolve possible issues with generated emails, remember to preview them in your web browser before sending, and possibly send out some test emails to yourself to assure yourself that email clients also render the email correctly.