Wow Group Form

At TIG, I’m part of group looking at a wide number of sites and technologies to learn about the “latest and greatest” that people are creating out there. The idea is that our group collects sites as we come across them, submits them to a central place, and we discuss the “latest and greatest” that we’ve found at our next meeting. One of my roles in this group is to collect the information and put it in one place, a surprisingly complicated task.

Getting The Data

• The collection mechanism needed to be simple, fast and easily accessible. To me, that ruled out a spreadsheet on a shared drive, as both the spreadsheet’s performance and a shared drive’s performance can sometimes be spotty.
• The time investment to input a new site could literally only be seconds, else people would be much less likely to even contribute.
• The data, upon its arrival to me, should be easily manipulated and stored for later retrieval.

Some of my options included:

• A Rails application. This could be built in fifteen minutes and would be the perfect solution. Sadly, not only does our server setup (that I have access to) support Rails, I don’t actually yet know how to deploy a Rails app.
• Any kind of form backed by a database. I did a lot of research on this one, looking for any online service that I thought would fit our accessibility and security standards. Unfortunately, I quickly found that a DB-backed system was not available to our group because of our server setup (even though, DBs are, obviously, available to our web sites).
• On-line Services. As mentioned, I explored a number of online list managers, survey forms and data collection tools, but found that we would fall just outside the scope of their “free” offerings in terms of usage.

None of these option seemed like viable possibilities, and I started looking into the capabilities of ColdFusion, as that seemed the most advanced option available (the server I have access to runs on CF). I found that CF allows for an “email submit” function, which skips the DB and drops an email to the specified address. I also found there were a few CF forms that were being used internally, so I would have some examples to work from. Although I was disappointed that the DB-backed option did not seem possible, if CF would allow the data to be formatted in a certain way, I could compromise and use an Excel form to store and retrieve the data.

Despite having never touched CF before, building the form, based on some other examples I had found, was not as difficult as I had anticipated.

Storing the Data

With the form built and working, the next challenge was formatting the data in a way to help Excel to help me. While not difficult, because even minor changes require the form to be filled out and then retested, this part took some time. Essentially, I wanted to cut and paste the data into Excel and have Excel’s functionality do the rest of the manipulation. Upon arrival to my inbox, the text-only email would look similar to this:
Jeff Stovall}UXMag}http://www.uxmag.com}CSS}Excellent example of fluid design.
Jeff Stovall}Couture Book}http://www.couturebook.com}Flash}Not only a good lifestyle site, also a great example of the right way to use Flash.

This data is pasted into Excel, where I used the text-to-columns function, with } as my delimiter, to quickly break out the data.

Retrieving the Data

This part’s pretty simple–I just saved the spreadsheet on our shared drive. While it’s not ideal, the tools at my disposal were limited for this project, and the solution I found saved myself and other group members significant amounts of time.