Shipping...

[mdlbear]

As of a visit to the post office tomorrow morning I'll have most of the pre-orders of Coffee, Computers, and Song in pre-addressed envelopes shipped off. The rest will require another round of signing and packaging, not to mention another round of minor hacking to pull together a mail-merge file from the various transaction files.

My project for the weekend is to extract names and shipping addresses from my two types of transaction files, and put them into proper format for a mail-merge with glabels. There are two types of transaction files because the paper pre-order forms were entered using a little web application and written into text files, while the ones from PayPal were constructed by simply downloading the detail pages.

I could have downloaded the PayPal info as a CSV file and put it into a spreadsheet, except that their CSV includes a lot of empty fields that mostly seem to be useful only for eBay, and doesn't include the "message" field that contains special instructions.

And besides, I have an aversion to databases and spreadsheets. As long as I have fewer than a couple of thousand transactions, flat files work better. (If I ever have to re-order, I'll worry about setting up a database.)

I do need to convert all my flat files into a common format so I can simplify my scripts, and enter in all the information from the random sheets of paper I've been using to keep track of sequence numbers and deliveries. And, yeah, it'll eventually turn into a report that looks a lot like a spreadsheet. But it'll probably be generated by a Perl script.

Whether I can get all that done over the weekend is a matter for conjecture.

Comments

[hms42]

Mine reached NY on the 25th. Thank you for the extra bonus. I cracked up laughing when I saw that.

Harold S.

[mdlbear]

You're welcome. Be sure to look on the inside edges of the tray card.

[hms42]

GROAN! I have heard that joke before.