People Love to Share

unday turned out to be an interesting day.  A little over a week ago I was pulled into a charitable project by a friend who attends my church.  He had taken on the responsibility to organize a "Sub for Santa" drive for a few of our families that are struggling to make ends meet this Christmas.  He had  a list of about 120 items that needed to be donated in less than a week and needed my help to publish the list and keep it organized.

He wanted to publish the list of needs on a blog, but wasn't sure how the sign up process would work.  Tracking the people who signed up for which items and keeping them from signing up for the same thing twice was going to be tricky.  I realized immediately that I would have to do a little programming to make this work.

So, I threw together a blog that described how the drive was going to work and left a little room at the bottom of the blog post for the list of items.  I bought a dot info domain for two bucks and pointed it at a virtual web/database server that I set up in the cloud (about $3.50/week to host).  I populated the database with the list of items and built a few really simple pages to show the list and display a simple signup form.

Here's the cool part.  I didn't want people to have to navigate away from the blog to see the list of items, so I built a really simple Javascript plugin that, when inserted into the blog post, would dynamically pull the list of items from the web server and display them on the page.  The items that were already donated were crossed out, the remaining items were links that led to the signup form.

Emails were sent to the members of our church and the signups began to pour in.  I had set up email alerts to be sent to my friend and me each time another item was donated.  It was amazing!  Every time my phone alerted me that I had a new email my wife and I couldn't wait to see what was signed up next. Within a few days we had most of the list crossed out.  By the end of the drive, every items was donated and the whole thing turned out to be a big success very fulfilling to everyone involved.

Screenshot of the donation list from the blog

From that experience, I decided to build a web app that would make it easy for anyone to create, publish and manage their own signup sheets.  I can imagine people using this app for all sorts of things:

• Sub for Santa
• Dinner parties
• Service volunteers
• School supply dontations
• Work parties
• Seminar sign ups
• Car poolers
• Etc, etc, etc

I hope to have the app in alpha by the end of this week.  I hope to add a signup list to my next blog entry that allows a limited set of interested users to sign up to try the first alpha trial.  Until then, I'll have a few long days and short nights getting everything ready.