Windows Phone Thoughts: Bring on the contests!

The first of my PHP Samurai has completed his mission, and it's a Samurai death blow! We now have a PHP script that will help us do software contests in 1/50th the time it took before. I kid you not - our manual process involved (take a deep breath Jason) going to our membership list, getting the total number of members at that moment in time, going to a web site with a random number generation script, punching in the number of items we were giving away, taking those random numbers, then manually going through the membership list, page by page, matching up the numbers with the users, looking up the email addresses for each user, and finally sending an email to each user informing them that they won. This is why we haven't had contests more frequently - the time involved in doing each one was painful, and the more generous the developer was with the number of copies that he gave away, the worse it was for us. I still wake up at nights screaming because of this process.

At any rate, Maciej Rutkowski was one of the Thoughts readers who responded to my plea for PHP developers. In the space of a few hours over the past two days, he put together a PHP script that completely automates this process! I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have this script, because now it will allow us to do more contests than ever before - which means it's all the more reason for you to register today and become eligible to win prizes. Developers - do you have a product you'd like to seed with our readership through a contest? We now have an easy mechanism to do so. One caveat to all this: we're sending the winning messages to whatever email address you have on file, so make sure your email address is up to date in your profile.

A few words about Maciej: he was an absolute delight to work with, and if you read Polish, there's no better site for your Pocket PC news than PocketPage.pl. He has single-handedly saved the Thoughts team hours of time, and made it easier for all of YOU to win free software. For that, we all owe him a big round of thanks! This task earns him the title of PHP Samurai - thanks Maciej!