I’ve just realise that I’m less of a techie than I used to be last year. I’m on the committee for the local branch of the BCS and the one thing we do every year is send out a survey to measure people’s feedback on the past year and put together a calendar for the next one. Well, last year I built the survey in ASP, deployed it on my own webserver, coded it to email me the results and made some fancy graphs in Excel. This year, I found a free online tool that did it all! It’s called SurveyMonkey and the free version (max 10 questions, 100 responses) is just perfect for what we want to do. In the past I would have opted to spend hours hand-crafting it, but nowadays, my motto is: if there’s a tool that does it, just use it!
Seems like I’m not the only person. My mate Carlo had a similar experience reading an obfuscated webpage. He could have written a de-obfuscator, but instead took the easy option: just check out Google Cache and pull out a clean version of the page. How cool is that?
There’s technology on the web to do anything you want to. All you need to do is find it 😉