After all this work planning the actual party and designing the website, the next big step is getting the word out.

There are sites that have the emails of a large number of spades players, but they are linked within charts and lists. To harvest the actual emails, she can download a free parsing program and run the parser on the different charts to compile her invitation list.

Once she has a compiled list, she needs to clean it up, removing duplicates and removing emails addresses that are no longer valid. Then she can send out one email notice, with an opt out line so she doesn’t get busted for being a spammer. The next challenge is to find a way to send multiple emails without triggering the receiving email client’s spam filter, or all her work will be automatically directed to the players’ bulk folder or spam folder and they notice won’t be read.

So there is quite a bit of work involved and not much time to do it. Thankfully, a lot of this can be handled using software to make things faster and easier, but there is still a need for the human touch and oversight.

My friend who is planning the spades party had a few questions tonight, so we stopped shooting messages back and forth on Yahoo Messenger and I gave her my phone number so she could call and talk, to save time.

Ideally, she wants to have an online form so people can register on the website with some core information, such as name, email address, when they plan to arrive, do they want to have the catered dinner on Saturday, etc.

Well, for this project to go from a simple web page as a flyer to a multiple page website with a form for data entry and perhaps shopping cart to handle the processing of the registration fee, there is a big difference in the amount of time that I can spend on this as a free favor.

Programmers have various methods of handling forms and that is getting into an advance skill level. There is information on the internet for people who want to learn about processing forms, and a few free or low cost sites that include simple forms as part of their hosting package. If you are asking the general public to input information, there is a good chance that someone will not enter the correct information or they will enter it in the wrong format. For instance, if you ask for an answer that includes a number, for example 45, there is a difference between these answers:

• 045
• 45.00
• forty-five

If the user puts the answer in the wrong format, you have a problem processing the answers. To help make sure the answers are in the format you need, your form needs to have a step or process called validation. You can see the benefit of using validation before the answers are accepted and why this is not longer a simple web page flyer.

This morning we toured a block of buildings in Manhattan that have been bought and will be torn down. Well, actually it is in Yonkers, but close enough. The new owner bought an entire city block and is in the process of notifying the tenants that their leases are being terminated and they have to move.

We looked at one of the buildings on the southwest corner to get a feel for the neighborhood and the view. The business there makes plastic things for hardware stores – I have no idea what most of it is for, but the guys were interested. The business owner is going to retire after he shuts down the business. He said he was going to stay open as long as he can for the sake of his 40+ employees, but the word is already out and several of them are quitting to go to other jobs, so timing is going to be an issue for him.

When he shuts down, we’ll demolish the whole building, so he mentioned the challenge of getting rid of everything. We’ve seen auctions to do that, but I know of a company that buys equipment and machine shop tools and then they sell it online. I told him about K. D. Capital so he can call them and see if they can help. I’m sure they will.

This will be a good site for our development. Looks like I’ll be spending a lot of time in New York this summer.

Wordpress 2.3 Released

That is right the Wordpress 2.3 version has been released and is ready for everyone running the best blogging platform on the internet to update to the next version.Lots of great features are being added and everyone should check out the post from the Wordpress Development blog for all the details on the update.

The iBar

Came accross this excellent video on YouTube of a new type of bar surface. When I first saw the Microsoft Surface I thought it was a great idea it just needed to be much bigger, and ofcourse one the length of an entire bar would be excellent. This one does not do any of the great things Microsofts Surfaces do but it is on the right track, they are calling it the iBar. I hope the people over at Microsoft read this post and make some next generation Surfaces this size of this one or being able to connect multiple Surfaces together would be awsome.