You don't have to wait any longer!

Participants do not have to wait anymore until the million donations are made. They are now sent an email with a link to their personalised voting form. Here is a sample of the voting form.

Also, there is a page that publishes the most recent entries. This includes the participant's choice of display name together with a few words and an optional link.

How it works: Everyday or so I download the transactions from paypal in a comma separated file. Then I use app engine's bulk uploader to create Donation entities in my datastore. An email is automatically sent to every participant with a link to his voting page. Also, once the vote is submitted, the participant receives an email ready to forward to family and friends, promoting the website. So it's mostly automated. All I do is download the paypal transaction history through paypal's management console, and upload it to my datastore via a command line. It was pretty easy. But it did take me roughly a total of 7 hours work to implement. I needed to learn more about app engine datastore api, email api and of course more Python basics.

So now I can finally start promoting the website a bit better. More about that in the coming posts.