Self-referential responsibility

My wife is starting a business, something I will blog more about in the future. The important part, for this story, is that all the web based things fell to me, and I turned to Google Apps. The startup process was amazing, in just two hours we went from zero to having our own domain name, a web site, email, chat, docs, and calendaring. There's just two employees in the business today, but we can add up to 200, and all for no costs beyond the $10 for the domain name registration.

Anyway, one of the things Lynne wanted was a registration form. I wanted to keep things simple and keep as much data in Google Apps as possible, so what I came up with was the idea of creating a registration form that appended the data into a Google Spreadsheet. Lynne was thrilled with the idea.

Now Google Page Creator doesn't have the ability to create forms using the GUI tools so I had to hand code one. Also, there is no gateway for moving form data into a spreadsheet, so I decided to write a little Python CGI script on bitworking.org that would take the output of the form, append it as a new row in the spreadsheet, and then redirect back to a page on the website.

So, for the record we have:

• A Python script
• using the gdata-python-client
• which uses the Atom Publishing Protocol
• to add data to a spreadsheet

As I'm coding this up it dawns on me:

If I can't get this to work, I have no one to blame but myself!