The catch with Wufoo – got data… what next?

Posted on May 4, 2007 by Thomas Purves

I’m still liking wufoo but now that people are actually using my form to make submissions, I’m running into the next obvious problem: Now What? Just collecting all the underpants information is -at best- only half the business problem anyone is ever trying to solve. Wufu does support a handy number of export options rss, excel, cvs. But if I’m going to do anything with this that isn’t just manual (like say format and spit the info back out to a consolidated webpage) I’m coming dangerously close to breaking the original assumption – that it’s super fast and I don’t have to know any php (god forbid).

What I really need is a oofuW service (Wufoo backwards, heh) that takes csv/rss/data and easy ajax/wizard like formating, does “stuff” with the input and spits out a pretty webpages appropriately (exactly the wufoo in reverse).

Interestingly, I also have the exact same problem with the eventbright ticketing service where I want to strip out certain fields and republish a “who’s coming” feed to my enterprisecamp.org website. So far I tried a csv to feed43 rss to drupal aggregator to try and semi-automate this. “semi” being the operative word, and “pretty ugly” being the other operative word.

suggestions? Is this a problem set that cries out for yahoo pipes? (I never did quite figure out what yahoopipes does)

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Most interesting flickr photostream, 941 years on.

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Thomas Purves

I bet it would have racked up lot of views and favourites since the twelfth century. If only they were counting. Check this youtube video for a wonderful animation of the Bayeux Tapestry. It strikes me how it reads just like the personal photostream of young William and his once fateful/adventurous summer trip to the south of England. It’s interesting to consider what parts they found most memorable – the making of the preparations, candid party shots from the big dinner the night before (heh, I’m not the only one who taking gratuitous food pictures), the time they blew up that old house etc.

I like these reminders of how all new media retrieves some archetypes of old dead media that came before.

Aside: remember that this is very much the Normand side of the story. Harold’s photostream would of course shown a whole other story had he lived to be the own writing/weaving history. (poor Harold assailed by Norway and the Normans that same year)

Dead Media doesn’t really die. It’s just pining for the fjords.

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2.0 Tools You can Use: Impressed by Wufoo

Posted on May 2, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Do you need a webform for something but you a) don’t know squat about programming or b) know lots of squats but would rather not waste your kunfu on such a mundane thing? Then check out wufoo.

I was setting up this page the other day. Which took a grand total of about 20 minutes end to end. I’d never tried wufoo before, the usability is just that good. And it’s a joy to use. Lovely ajaxy, no programming required other than cutting and pasting a few lines of code to embed the form on my site (even that’s optional). And I got to pick the colors and add my own logo. sweet.

How the times change. The key is you don’t have to ask anyone to do it for you. The skills or the time required is not even a factor anymore with building (very simple) web apps like this.

Instant IT, just add water. recommended.

If we had had an enterprise grade version* of wufoo running behind the firewall at the bank, I can’t even begin to explain the internal process efficiencies that could have been achieved. [meanwhile that particular bank still has entire departments still dedicated to churning out standardized forms based on Word97/2000 and VB Macros – the horror]

*which is a version of wufoo that, sadly, doesn’t exist yet as far as I can tell – but we can always live in hope.

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