exit17

Mining the internet for help!

Hey Internet –

You may have seen that I started the Idea A Day…uh…service(?) along with Mr. Kenneth Bartleby Poindexter Gagnon The Ninth. If you read the intro over on the Idea A Day main page, you’ll get an idea of what it is.

I’ll wait. Go do that.

Back? Good. It’s a fine and dandy thing that we are doing, and Ken and I enjoy it – it sort of gets our brains rolling first thing in the morning, some creativity before we settle in for a day of blog checking, Twittering, and the occasional work-related task.

But we need to somewhat automate it – even if we could automatically create emails from the account, or something involving a database. Read on if you’d like to learn about our situation.

Because I’m a tard and have little to no serious internet skills (despite what you might think), the entire process is MANUAL. No databases, no mailing lists.

Here’s how it works, on our end:

1. Someone goes to exit17.net/idea_a_day. They enter their name and email, and click submit.

2. The email address idea_a_day@exit17.net gets an email with the persons name and email (yay cgiemail).

3. This persons name and email is noted in a spreadsheet.

4a. After the idea machines have been fired up and it’s time to start spreading our knowledge, I email Ken half of the list. I keep half for myself. We send ideas to those people.

4b. Sending emails entails going to webmail, clicking “Compose”, typing in the email address, typing in IDEA A DAY [date]! in the subject line, typing “HEY [name]!” followed by the idea.

4c. Clicking send.

5. Ken and I have to do this for each person. We currently have about 40 subscribers (which is totally rad, don’t get me wrong), but I imagine we’ll have at least 100 total at some point in the reasonably near future. At which point Ken and I will be doing steps 4a-4c for everyone.

Now, I am not complaining that we have to type out each idea. That is part of the charm of this whole thing – the fact that EVERYONE gets a unique idea every day. But the structure/mechanics of the workflow is friggin terrible.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to how this can be made easier?

I am reluctant to do it outside of webmail, as I like to work from multiple computers and Ken is doing it from work – so automating something in Outlook is out of the question.

The problem is, many existing mailing list tools send the same message to everyone – we have to have a unique message to each person, which rules out all of those.

Even something that just created a few dozen “Compose” windows with the email, the subject and the text HEY [name]! would be great.

Something with Python? An Apple script pulling names from a spreadsheet? Well trained monkeys? Ryan Gray?

Give me a hand internet, and help me keep the ideas flowing.

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