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NBD News
April 21, 2009

Spring!

Well it was a long time coming, but it's finally here. (I guess that could be said of spring or this edition of NBD News, which is long overdue.)

Since my last edition in January, a lot has happened: I have a new nephew, I got a Xootr for my birthday, and my significant other accepted a job at Boston University. So, at the end of this summer, we'll be  packing up and heading east. Lucky for me, my freelance work is very portable, so I'll be setting up shop in Boston again once we get settled.

Till then, I hope to keep up NBD News more regularly. As always, get in touch if you have topics you'd like me to cover.

This month my featured client is NAPO St. Louis; the Explainer is on the use of forms on the web; What's Next features an easy way to poll your readers; and for the new NBD News contest, I hope to do just that.

Featured Client: NAPO St. Louis

My featured client for April is the St. Louis chapter of NAPO (the National Association for Professional Organizers). My work for Peace of Mind Organizing led to this job, which involved first a logo, then a website with information for the public, a searchable member database, as well as private pages with members-only resources . This site was a fun challenge for me, as it involved creating many web forms (see the Explainer, below) and a substantial amount of server-side coding (PHP and MySQL) to build the member database, database management, and member search pages. While my main web-related expertise is in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I find working with true programming languages such as PHP sometimes mind-bending, but always rewarding.

If you are in the greater St. Louis area and need the help of a professional organizer, find one on their site!

Explainer: Forms on the Web

Most of the time when you are surfing the web, you are simply viewing information: images, text, video, etc. But when you use a form on a website, you are interacting with the web site's server by sending information and expecting some action or response in return. Common examples of web forms are signup forms, login forms, and contact forms.

But what happens to information you submit via a web form? Well, there are a number of possibilities. In the case of signup forms, for example, the data you submit is sent back to the server, and after processing, is stored in a database. For a login form, you send your username and password to the server, it checks that against a database, and responds either by logging you in or, if the login is incorrect, sending an error. From a contact form, the information is first sent back to the server, and after processing is then emailed to the recipient of the form. This is where the two technologies I mentioned earlier, PHP and MySQL, come in. PHP is a programming language that can be used for (amongst other things) processing forms, and MySQL is a type of database that can store information collected from forms.

What's Next: Poll your audience

Speaking of collecting information via web forms, have you ever wanted to get your website visitors' opinions on something? Polls are a quick and easy way to get some input from your readers (provided your question fits into a simple multiple-choice format). I've been playing around with a couple of online poll-creation services: PollDaddy (recommended by my client Janine Adams), and PollAuthority, a very similar competitor. After creating the same survey in each, I think PollDaddy is the better service right now. PollAuthority seems to be a newer service, so perhaps they'll catch up. You can read my full review and see the polls.

New NBD News Contest!

This month I'm doing a slightly different kind of contest. Rather than have one person win (congrats to Geralin Thomas, by the way, for winning her custom Twitter background), everyone can win! Here's how it works: If at least 50% of my newsletter recipients complete these polls on my blog (please vote the same in each), everyone on my newsletter list will win a free, very classy desktop wallpaper pattern. Having some data to view from these polls will really help me finish my comparison of the two polling services. Voting in the polls will only take a few seconds, but if you care to leave a comment or email me about the voting experience, even better!