Who says that I am not an irrepressible madcap? The next big geek project that I wanted to get done over vacation was a secure contest tracking web site for Erie Gay News. We have been averaging about a contest or 2 every week, and I wanted to have a way for the contest sponsors to be able to login and see some elementary statistics for the contests that we run for them (contest article page views, total number of entrants, summary totals for state and zip code, etc.) I also wanted to be sure to preserve privacy for entrants, and so I figured that out as well. (Duh, just figure out what recordsets to show.)
The contest administration has grown and changed a lot over the years. I used to just manually create a form on a page, and copy/paste the resulting emails into a database. It is much more automated now, so I can set stuff up fairly quickly and painlessly, and notification is pretty much a breeze.
It makes me feel good that we can help artists and others spread the word about their work, and reward people who visit the Erie Gay News site with an occasional freebie now and then. This also helps us to make connections with more people, which helps us mobilize the community when we need to.
Hopefully, I will be able to get the next project done as well.
Recent Comments