So, I have a couple famous friends and one of them asked if I could write a little app that could help him send emails to folks on his totally legit email list. Well, since it is a totally legit email list, folks that really do want to hear from him, I felt pretty comfortable writing the app on google appengine. About a day after he asked for a little help, google released an offline taskqueue that could be used nicely for sending emails. Rather serendipitous, I thought.
Lesson in non-engineer customers: sometimes they want you to do things that you think you can’t do, but with a little effort you can. My friend said he would like to just maintain spreadsheets in google docs for who to send to, then have my program look at the spreadsheets and send accordingly. I was like, “yeah, I don’t think we can do that.” We started to discuss how to maintain the email list just with my app, how to keep things in sync, how to query for users in a certain country or state, etc. Messy. Well, turns out using the gdata api, I can authenticate a user, talk to google docs, allow the user to pick a spreadsheet / worksheet, then pull stuff like email addresses. Awesome!
Took a few nights, but I have something up and running. My friend says he will give me some nice powered by links when he sends and I am hoping for a blog post here or there.
If you happen to have a totally legit email list (very serious about that part) and would like to trade some sending help for some publicity / marketing, please drop a line to cahille AT yahoo DOT com.
Enjoy!
Earl