Solo Technology

I was approached by one of our owners today with what seemed like a very simple project. Now we all know that anytime a project seems simple it probably won’t be — and it seemed like this one was going to follow tradition.

“Chris, how tough would it be to do a simple web site where we capture some simple data about people who want to show their support for <specific topic>?”

Sure, you’d initially think that’s pretty easy too, right? “Seems simple enough. Heck, I’ll just bang out a quickie little ASP/PHP/ASP.NET site and have it running before lunch.”

But then the damning rays of common-sense start to shine through…

Hmm, I should spend some time doing input validation, eh? Would hate to lose the server because I didn’t sanitize those inputs!
How do we want this branded?
I suppose we should involve the marketing team and get more input?

Pretty soon that very simple project started looking like multiple days of meetings, security tests and consensus building.

Yuck.

After stepping back and pondering some different approaches^[1] I believe I hit on a far simpler way (for me at least) to go about this. Remember Google Forms? They have a nifty way to link a form and spreadsheet together. The form can be on just about any web page (via the low-tech wonders of iframes) or even sent via email. Fields can be defined as mandatory/optional and flyover hints can be added.

Perfect!

My data collection system was prototyped within 3 minutes.

Ten minutes later I had a map gadget added linked to the zip code column in the spreadsheet. A simple yet effective way to see where replies where originating.

Now the marketing guys can just focus on a nice looking page, I’ll drop my form into the middle of it and we’re done. Dunno how long this project will take, but my piece is pretty much done. And that’s the way I like it.

I reckon I could’ve also looked at Zoho Polls, but that thought didn’t occur until just now… although I guess what we’re after is almost more of a petition than a Poll.

[1] One of the approaches I was initially in love with was to do a WordPress install. Single page with comments to gather data. But some of the data I want to gather is “non standard.” Modifying WP to handle that might very well have negated the convenience of using a turn-key option (and any security benefits that might’ve come with it).

One Response to “Very Simple Data Collection”

1. Arvind on July 10th, 2008 3:01 pm
   

   Chris : Have Zoho Creator as an option as well.

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