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I recently wrote a blog on how to immediately mail somebody who filled in your +Google Docs Form. Hope it’s useful for you.
I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something”. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is ….
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I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.
I have a hosted WordPress.cam blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.
Using the tutorial and Script Editor, which uses javascript, I had a starting point. I wanted three changes:
The first two changes where easily done by changing the example script. Rather than cycling through the spreadsheet with a for-loop I requested the last rowData. And I would be using A1 for the subject and A2 for the mail body, instead of using A1 for the body and having a hard code subject line.
function sendEmails() {
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var dataSheet = ss.getSheets()[0];
var dataRange = dataSheet.getRange(2, 1, dataSheet.getMaxRows() - 1, 4);
var templateSheet = ss.getSheets()[1];
var emailTemplate = templateSheet.getRange(“A2”).getValue();
objects = getRowsData(dataSheet, dataRange);
var rowData = objects[objects.length-1];
var emailSubject = templateSheet.getRange(“A1”).getValue();
MailApp.sendEmail(rowData.mailAddress, emailSubject, emailTemplate);
}
For the last requirement I needed to use the Triggers functionality, which can be found in the menu. Select Current project’s triggers… and add a new trigger which should be run On form submit.
Image source: Search Engine People
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Shhh!This didn’t happen.
This week, we interview Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, Paulo Coelho, international bestselling author of The Alchemist and several other books, plus we talk about lighting, 12 in 12, and much …
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I think that 2012 will probably see the adoption of multiple identities on multiple networks.
There is a new wind, actually a very old wind, blowing through social application users. As social applications are being adopted by the mainstream limitations of social applications are also being….
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Google+ is where I get my news
Daniël Crompton shared a circle with you.
Daniël Crompton, Tray McGuire, Maggie Mobley, Pete Cashmore, Ernie Smith, Dave Francois and 33 others.
View circle » |
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So exciting!
Last year, Google decided to shutter Google Labs, a place where a number of incredibly wonderful experimental projects lived. Among the projects that got the ax was one of my favorites: Google’s A…
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Future of TV on BBCThanks +Rory Cellan-Jones for including me on your future of TV special.http://bbc.in/zHHTGgIf you have really sharp eyes you’ll also see +Trey Ratcliff.
Rory-Cellan Jones journeys from Silicon Valley to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - on a quest to discover whether television and the internet were born to be together.
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But what — exactly — is an “illegal file”?As Leo Bicknell astutely pointed out in this thread: “Also, when using a hashed file store, it’s possible that some uses are infringing and some are not.”His example goes on to explain how this is so. (And I’ll point out that his example applies, for example, to Amazon. There are coprighted files there — e.g., books, music — which may be used legally by those who have purchased them. Do they become infringing if someone finds a way to access them without authorization/payment because Amazon’s programmers made an error and left a backdoor open that allow them to be retrieved via static links? No, they don’t. Should Amazon delete them in this instance? No. Amazon should fix the backdoors, i.e., remove the spurious links.)Suppose that Joe and Jane are photographers. Joe has produced image X (to which he holds copyright) and Jane has produced image Y (similarly). Digital images X and Y are used as inputs to program P which produces output Z that is visually unrecognizable — that is, anyone who looks at it sees what appears to be random noise.Does Z infringe on Joe or Jane’s copyrights? How? Why?How does this change (or does it change) if program P’ which can reverse the actions of P exists?Let me give another example, this time using content that is intrinsically illegal — and to avoid triggering hot-button responses, I’m going to posit a hypothetical: marshmallow peep dioramas. Let’s suppose that these are illegal in every country on the planet, that those responsible for them are universally reviled, that it’s a crime to photograph them, possess photographs of them, etc.We thus conclude that a file consisting of a picture of one of these is always illegal: that is, it’s illegal no matter where it’s found.Now what happens if that picture is decomposed into individual files, each consisting of one row of pixels from the original? None of those files contain anything recognizable as a marshmallow peep diorama. The original cannot be reconstructed from any one of them.Is any one of them illegal?Further: reassembling these will require something: an index, an algorithm, some construct that allows the individual files to be recombined. (This construct contains no content of any kind, marshmallow peep or otherwise. It’s merely a recipe for putting together files.) Is that construct illegal?If those individual files are spread across a multitude of hosts, are any of those hosts holding an illegal file? How would they know?(If you’re going to argue that those individual rows of pixels are illegal because the original is illegal, then replace the above with “individual pixels”. I trust nobody will argue that a single pixel is illegal. Ever.)One more scenario: a photo of a marshmalllow peep diorama is encrypted and uploaded onto server A. Does server A hold an illegal file? How would the operators of server A know? How would anyone (other than the uploader) know? Now suppose that the uploader, the only person on the planet with the decryption key for that file, dies; therefore, the file is reduced to — for all practical purposes — a random collection of bits. Is that file still illegal? Why? How? Who will be able to determine this? (Schrodinger’s cat paradox in 1…2…)I posit these thought experiments (and I’ll stop here, although many others suggest themselves) to highlight some serious problems with terminology, and with the law: it’s an attempt to apply the principles of the physical world to the digital one, and it’s a total failure. The putative sharp dividing line between “legal file” and “illegal file” doesn’t really exist — although many people would like it to exist, hope it exists, etc., because it serves their agendas or would make things easier for them. That doesn’t make it so.Sometimes the world changes, and sometimes when it does, it’s time to discard outdated philosophy that no longer applies to current reality — because stubborn attempts to hang onto it at all costs, especially by warping it into something completely unrecognizable from the original framework, really DO cost, often dearly. (It’s 2012, and there are still inferior people living on this planet who assign more credibility to astrology and ghosts than to evolution or anthropocentric global warming. This isn’t funny or quaint any more. It’s stupid and dangerous.)Schneier famously said “Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet”. What we are witnessing is precisely an attempt to do that, via a combination of anti-security technology (e.g., DRM) and purchased legislation, orchestrated by failing, legacy companies run by insatiably greedy people. These people simply don’t care how much damage they do, how many lives they destroy, how much they hold back civilization, how much they twist the law, — as long as they get paid. They are exactly like one of their own famous characters: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with.
It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse… I’m not big on videos over a minute long, but this one really lays out the war on sharing that underlies bills like SOPA (and its predecessors COICA, ACTA, and the DMCA). Some excerpts: SOPA and PI…
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I have a confession, I am a former software vendor, I’ve worked for software vendors as a consultant, and I’ve been guilt of delivering a solution which didn’t work as advertised. This is sadly an all too common occurrence which can be due to many things which I will not be discussing here. Here I will identify some of the common pitfalls that all vendors face, and what can be done to reduce and mitigate the risks these pose.
There are a number of pitfalls that a vendor can fall into when addressing the issue or the customer, Groopman calls[1] these the 3 A’s:
Your first instinctive reaction when being presented with an issue can be a compelling elegant simple solution and can often be right. And sometimes the solutions are completely wrong, and you can become increasingly convinced of the truth of this misjudgment, and developing a psychological commitment to it. You can become wedded to a distorted conclusion. This is anchoring, your opinion is like an anchor weighing you down. Also referred to as paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking.
Errors of availability are also common to make, every other customer has this issue which you solve in a certain way and you simply apply Ockham’s razor to this customer. It is the simplest solution, they must also have this issue. This can mean that you ignore certain signals that don’t fit in your diagnosis, perhaps it is a simple issue and perhaps it’s a case of search satisfaction: you expected to find something, find something and stop searching rather than finishing your search.
Attribution can be as simple as believing that the customer is a complainer, and so it’s not as bad as they are saying. The argument that: “it’s a not a bug, it’s a feature” is also an attribution error.
There are 3 easy solutions to resolve these pitfalls, these are the 3 Cs:
Consider that there are ofter many unknowns with issues, so with the knowledge of the pitfalls apply critical reasoning to what you’re thinking. Communicate correctly with you customer, get it clear what the issue is, what the possible solutions will be, and if appropriate what the price is. And show compassion, they most probably rely on you and your software to get their job done. Which means that when it fails they can’t do their jobs.
Image source: Sebastian Fritzon
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Over the years I’ve become increasingly frustrated in my dealings with software vendors, so rather than ranting I decided to help them.
I have a confession, I am a former software vendor, I’ve worked for software vendors as a consultant, and I’ve been guilt of delivering a solution which didn’t work as advertised. This is sadly an ….
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Image source: http://bit.ly/yD8WA5
