The Blog

Roadmap completed, online registration available

Posted by christian on Sunday, June 28, 2009 · 2 comments

I proudly announce the completion of the roadmap imposed end of last year. Every announced feature has been released in time, with the registration process as the last item today. The latter caused quite a heavy workload, but all that counts is the fact that the feature is implemented and available for everybody now.

Two events tested the registration during June:

  • the Summerlove with 140+ individual subscriptions for Paris' Hat Summer League, and
  • Scottish tournament MacBeach looking to find 12 teams to chase plastic on the beach of Troon.

After having organised a summer league with 100+ players last year I really felt the need for a tool that takes care of ever-changing excel sheets and tons of back-and-forth e-mailing. The now available new automated online bid submission system offers exactly this.

All you need is the ownership of a ffindr event website (this is easy, just add your tourney or ask for transferral of ownership if your tourney has been created by someone else). You then have the option to Create an online registration for this event. Then you are asked to provide a contact e-mail address, the number of available spots, the registration period and the content of the confirmation e-mail that each subscriber will receive. In addition you can define questions that everybody who wants to send a bid (i.e. want to participate) should answer. You can choose between three kinds of answers:

  1. a text answer which is totally up to the bidder
  2. you provide one or more answers to choose one from or
  3. one or more answers to choose many.

And that's all, your job is now to watch the bids flying in. You will get a copy of each confirmation e-mail, plus a link to an ever up-to-date Excel file that reflects all submitted bids. ffindr certainly allows you to edit the submitted bids, actually even the bidders themselves can modify their submitted bids... they just need to be logged in during bid submission.

Once the registration is closed and you made your choice among the bids (you can move the bids around between the selected and waiting list by easy drag&drop), everything is ready to send out the invitations. To do so, just click on Announce selection and close registration, adapt the e-mail content for your invitation and refusal mails and confirm. Congrats, you just informed everybody about its status (whether he is invited or he is sitting on the waiting list). That's all the magic.

Back to roadmapping. So the first half of 2009 is done, ready to attack the second. But this time I won't impose such a tough roadmap with a steady workload. I must admit that I probably spent a little too much time on ffindr (unfortunately ffindr is still a side-project only, which means that I have to work on it during evenings, nights and weekends). There are still heaps of smaller tunings to do that are mostly invisible to the user but that need to get done. Concentrating on this and reserving some time for eventual bug fixes and smaller user requests will keep me occupied during the next six month.

And finally there is quite some evangelisation work to do. Somehow the Frisbee world has to learn how much life can be easier by using the new tournament registration on ffindr. I invite you to help me with this... and to keep the suggestions flowing. ffindr is you, ffindr is us.

2 comments

  1. Great job Christian! Something that was really needed. Next BDP we'll use your system :-)

    See you on the beach!

    Patrick

    Patrick van der Valk says on July 3, 2009 3:15 AM

  2. Cheers for your comment, Patrick!

    See you on the beach (thanks to the BDP'09 shirt I finally know how to get there... ;)

    christian says on July 7, 2009 2:25 PM

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