The Giveaway Robot (he needs a better name1) has named the lucky winners in the SliceReader giveaway. He claims to have notified them all with a stunning email he generated himself and sent through my GMail relay to avoid being spammed. Hopefully. Just in case, here are the winners, contact me if you didn’t hear from “GR”.

  • Jason Cutler
  • Boone Severson
  • Guy Fain
  • Peter Kretzman
  • Jim Withington

Congratulations everybody! If you didn’t win, SliceReader is still awesome and still only $2.99. Check it out.

Because you weren’t wondering…

The new giveaway system worked perfectly, I think. It weeded out multiple entries and records IPs to quickly give me a warning if it gets gamed (not that $2.99 giveaways are high value targets, but I plan to offer luxury cars in the future). It also provides the counter on the form via a simple REST API.

Here’s how the process looks:

  1. I create a Couch database with a unique name for the giveaway and insert a list of codes for the giveaway in a document.
  2. I insert a giveaway form in a Jekyll post with the Liquid tag {% giveaway unique_name EXPIRATION_DATE_STRING %}.
  3. When that tag is detected on publish, it schedules a build for the expiration date/time.
  4. The tag plugin checks for past dates when it runs, automatically removing the form when the contest is over.
  5. Then it counts the codes provided, generates random numbers within the total entries and picks out a matching number of winners.
  6. It handles notifying them by (beautiful HTML) personalized email (generated in Marked) with their code and instructions.
  7. It emails me the list of winners so I can write a post like this.

It worked swimmingly. If anyone wants to see any pieces of the tool, just let me know, here or on Twitter.

  1. I wanted to call him the Killotron 7800 but he said it didn’t fit with his self-perception. ↩