- Good Company
- Visits to Trinidad
- Impressions of Cuba
- Operation Lobster
- Dining In Cuba
- First Day in Cuba
- More under Cuba 2006...
- A Week in My World
- The Nightmare Category
- How does Bell get away with it?
- Complicated
- Cool Tools
- Water, water everywhere
- A Fan Letter Answered
- Bring on the rum drinks…
- More under General...
- Another day, another drama
- (can't think of a title that doesn't sound like whining)
- It's the Most Wonderful Time Of the Year!
- They Grow Up so Quickly
- Another Snow Day
- The Nice Thing to Do
- When Children Disappoint
- Uncomfortable Situation
- More under Parenting...
- Pop-Culture Retard
- The Not-so-Incredible Hulk
- Transformers
- Survivor Fiji Outcome
- Chick Flick vs Dick Flick
- Irony Dept.
- Tarantino Meets CSI
- Don't Get Your Hopes Up, Wil...
- More under Pop Culture...
A Week in My World
Been working on a project for one of my clients that involves sending out a daily events calendar to their members (mostly hotels, restaurants & B&B's.) I think we finally finished it up yesterday but it only took several weeks to get over all the hurdles. Of course once it's in regular use I'm sure there will be lots of "issues" to work out – there always are when you're dealing with an organization with over 200 cranky members.
The concept was relatively simple - someone in their office selects the desired date or date range from a form in the admin section of the website and a more or less random and truncated selection of the day's events and attractions are pulled from the database, presented nicely in a printer-friendly format and sent out to the member mailing list. Then they can print one off and post it somewhere for their guests.
Problem #1 was although we CAN send mass mailings direct from the website it a.) takes time and b.) as often as not gets trapped as spam. Normally for member and consumer mailings they use a third party offering called Constant Contact. Not feasible here.
The web host solved the problem by telling us about something called Mailman that was already available as part of the hosting package. All we have to do is send one email to the mailing list's address and it sends it out to all the subscribers, with all the right anti-spam headers. Brilliant.
Except it doesn't work.
Problem #2 turns out to be that any email address on the website's domain gets sent to an exchange server. So it's never reaching Mailman and ending up in cyber limbo. Boo. Wait a week or so until their IT department gets back to us. Wait another 2 weeks after we find out the company that does their IT has changed hands and NO ONE THERE knows anything about the freaking exchange server.
Finally it's decided we'll just create another domain and set up an email address and Mailman on that account. Test with the new address - yay, it works. Except ...
Problem #3 - I discover I can't send HTML formatted email from the web server to the mailing list, although the tests from my computer's server work fine. Anything that comes through just looks like raw HTML code.
Back to the drawing board. Decide to send it out as plain text with a link to the pretty HTML formatted one on the website. Trouble is - the events are selected RANDOMLY which means the list sent out in the email may not match the ones on the website - and for some reason this is seen as a problem. End up sending the link as a long complicated URL with a long list of variables in it in order to get the same list. Yikes!!! Half the time the URL gets broken in the mailing and does not work. Grrr.
In the midst of this, the Biggest Tourist Draw in the City decides it wants it's day's performances included with the events. Problem is, they won't give us a way to do that. No database, no XML file, will not enter them on our site, nothing. After waiting for two weeks for them to come up with something I decide to take matters into my own hands and figure out a way for a script to read in the raw html code for their monthly calendar from their website, search through the string of gibberish to find the right date, find the performances and times for that date, translate them into English from the truncated version that appears in the calendar, consult an array of play titles and theatres to find where it's being shown, and display them. And three hours of programming later, it actually works! I feel extremely clever.
Yesterday - finally - they send a spreadsheet of their performances so I decide to use that instead. Set up a data table and all is well. More reliable since the other method all depends on their website being "up", plus it is a bit slow.
Also, after asking the web host what was up with not sending HTML-formatted emails, one of their tech guys plays around with my script and adds a few extra end-of-line characters after the mime parts. (yeah, I didn't understand it either.) Suddenly it works. Back to the pretty version, out with the plain text version. I think we're in business.
Now I wait for the inevitable complaints - why wasn't such-and-such event shown on a particular day?
This is what I do for a living.
Filed under General, Jun 11, 2008
No comments yet
Leave a comment