Zoho

How Zoho Creator 3 Made Me Feel Like An Idiot

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Wowza. I feel like a big huge pile of something that rhymes with pit.

I made a shameful discovery this afternoon that I likely would never have noticed if it weren’t for the talented folks at Zoho. They released a major upgrade to their Creator software yesterday. This is the program I used to create my contact form. And this brings me to my shameful discovery.

I have been a horrible example of customer service. In a media such as blogging that thrives on readers, comments, and community involvement, I made a big mistake. I logged into my Zoho Creator account and checked on the contact form application that I made for Geek Stew. I wanted to make sure it was working, because I thought it was odd that I had never received a submission from the form. I was shocked to find that there were several submissions, and I for the past year I never knew about a single one. Let me explain.

When I created the application, I set it up to email me whenever someone filled out the form. (Just one of several simple features that make Creator one of the easiest way to make a web application.) Another option was to customize the subject line and body text of the email that was delivered to me. The problem was, I didn’t make these two items descriptive enough.

For the past 12 months, I have been receiving sporatic vague emails that look like this:

From: [MyEmailAddress]@asu.edu
To: [MyEmailAddress@asu.edu
Subject: New Comment at Geek Stew

“There is a new comment at Geek Stew.”

And for the last 12 months, I have not been able to figure out where these emails were coming from. I thought they were coming from my old ASU blog account that was previously hosted on ASU’s Wordpress Multi-User platform. There was no links in the emails, and no indication of where they came from. So I have been ignoring the emails. Lame.

I would like to publicly apologize to some people for not responding to their submissions. That is not how I roll. I will spend some time this week sorting through all of them and replying to people. Here are the people/organizations that I have unknowingly ignored:

1. Zey Gutierrez from KeywordSpy.com
2. Cory O’Brien from iChapters.com
3. Tom Hanson from OpenEducation.net
4. Mandy Kakavas from WooMe.com
5. Max Prilutsky from Revoluminary.com
6. Maria Reiling from Chegg.com
7. Jenny Murphy from GuerillaPR.com
8. Kelly Sutton from HackCollege.com