Essential Mixologist Forms — May 21

Okay, yeah, so I'll tell you right now, this is going to be difficult to do in an email just because you're talking about making this form accessible. I see what you sent me earlier — it looks pretty good. I believe that you're taking a reasonable approach. I honestly would have probably discouraged you from taking this route too, mostly because creating an email that looks correct is often a pretty difficult task. It's very difficult due to all the protections in place to prevent potentially dangerous emails from getting sent to people. Email providers do a bunch of sanitization, where they remove a bunch of the stuff that makes up the email. Looking at your email, for example, I can see that even though you've styled things in your artifact, the styling has been removed partially. But it doesn't look bad or anything. It just looks different. I don't know if you need Netlify at all if we're just going to be sending this via direct email. The question becomes how we're going to want to send all of these emails — is it through MailChimp? What I can do is make sure to get this set up as much as we can without the information that you need to finalize things. And then we can make changes as we need and figure out who the UCEDD distributor is, and make any required changes to the mailing list or to the form.

I think there's something in this that's saying it's 2025 instead of 2026. Yeah, I'm just going to double check on that here really quick. Yeah, looks like there was just a minor issue — it read 2025, but it should be 2026. I'm currently deploying your form to a website. I guess it's nearby where the Essential Mixologist website is, as far as where servers are and where code is hosted. So we'll be able to test it out in just a moment. Okay, almost set up here. Yeah, you did a great job with the artifact itself. So what I'll do is, assuming all looks fine, I'm going to set up the backend, where we're creating a database to store all the emails. I can set something up to notify you when people fill out the form. It costs a little money on my end, but it's not a big deal. We could do Google Forms. It's just the jankier way to do it, to be honest. Google Forms is great, but you don't get to customize it to look pretty. You're locked into just the Google Workspace tools. I think what you put together with Claude is great and I can just wire it up with everything else.

Do we need any sort of email to get sent to the user after they submit? I'll have an email get sent to you every single time someone fills it out. I'll also be creating a database. Diane: "Wait, I don't want that — I just want Diane to get an email. Do we want this whole business address section?"

It'll just require a little bit more work. That gives us enough time to potentially implement something like that. It would be great to get a system like this architected so that it would be fairly straightforward to set this up in advance — everyone knows exactly how it's gonna work after the show. We'd set up the automations to send emails, and everything is coordinated at once across the company instead of having you do it, then Chloe do it for a couple people, and some other people do it too. It just doesn't make sense to do it like that. Hopefully we can fix that. Okay, so I added a Google map. Yeah, that is a required field. I can make sure that it's actually going to force it to be required, and it should work as it was already set up. I'm going to make sure that it's deployed on this new instance I've got going here.

What URL do we need to put in this format? If we were going to let the entire team do it, I would probably create some sort of custom route for your forms where I go — like, I can't control your computer, but I might be able to do /diane and /forms or something. That's probably how I would do it, but I'm not gonna go out of my way just yet until we know exactly whether or not we're going to do it for other people on the team. But I do think this is good to test. As you see here, the URL is forms.theEssential.com, and you can share that with Chloe right now. It should work just fine. You should be getting emails potentially from the form submission I made. I can't control your computer anymore until you press continue. So what I was talking about is, in terms of theory, this should have sent something — maybe it's not sending to the right email, potentially. I'll need to double check on that here.

But basically, we're done. There's just this email setup thing, which obviously you've got basically a whole weekend to get set up.