No, this isn’t a copywriting article. It’s a plea to all office managers who send insertion text to webmasters.
This is also a horror story, so if you have a weak stomach, click away now!
Julie is the owner and publisher of the Fredericksburg Guidebook and its companion website, fredericksburgguidebook.com.
It is a quarterly publication. Advertisers pay for inclusion in the guidebook and can pay for a listing online.
Each quarter, the office manager solicits new business, while updating and deleting existing accounts.
Naturally, I get the results for updating the website.
“It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, my cell phone rang. Julie wanted an update to the list of sponsors on her website.”
You Want it WHEN?
The quarterly list of advertiser insertions, deletions and modifications was on its way to my in-box.
As usual, I was getting it at the last minute. The pressure was on! (I had never missed a deadline and I wasn’t about to start, now.)
I had just under a week to update the website.
This is NOT What I Asked For!
The first update I ever received from the office manager was in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Cruella (not her real name) explained her system to me and I told her that I could work with that. I had written a custom database program that reads text and pumps out web pages. But for this project, I modified it to import the spreadsheet data into a database table.
Unfortunately, after just two updates, Cruella changed her system and started using Microsoft Word! So I had to re-tool my factory, so to speak. I added some widgets and doo-dads and fairy dust that allowed me to feed the required text file for this project.
Now, all I had to do was convert the Word document into the proper text format.
Are You Feeding Me A Line?
Long-time Word users know that there are three ways to generate a new line of text:
- Natural break (you just keep on typing and Word “wraps” the text)
- Manual line break (hold the Shift key down and press the Enter key)
- Paragraph break (just press the Enter key)
Well, Cruella managed to get all three of them into one document! This simply means that she had no fixed format for her data. Actually, in most cases, there was a manual line break between the ad copy and the contact information. In addition, there were usually two paragraph breaks between advertisers. To make things interesting, she inserted three paragraph breaks between categories of advertisers. For example, all of the restaurants were listed together, followed by all of the beauty salons.
That helped.
I used Word’s search and replace to convert all the manual line breaks to paragraph breaks.
Next, I converted every paragraph break to this pair of characters:
~p
This removes all the formatting information, which is stored with the paragraph mark. (Believe me, you’ll go blind alternating between 14 pt headers and 10 pt body text!)
Then, I went through the document, looking for groups of these and stamping out inconsistencies.
Once I ensured that all the advertisers were separated from each other by exactly one ~p, I made sure each category was separated by two ~p ~p.
Finally, I converted each ~p back into a paragraph break.
I pasted the whole kit and caboodle into a plain text file and fed it to my Frankenstein monster.
Hyper Text
One gritty detail that I’ve hidden from you, gentle reader, is that fredericksburgguidebook.com originally had tons of duplicated ads listed in different categories.
Julie insisted that this is what her clients demanded. If you wanted to visit a restaurant for a juicy steak, you might miss Pablo’s Ice Cream Land, who serves steak, pizzas and ice cream! Poor Pablo would have to plaster his ad in three categories!
Pablo, a fictional businessman, had nothing on the real restaurant owners, some of whom had 14 copies of the same ad throughout the site.
After that update debacle, I insisted that the office manager learn to do her own updates!
WordPress to the Rescue!
My son Sheldon tweaked a WordPress theme so that the advertisers’ categories and subcategories would show up in the sidebar.
Meanwhile, I opened up the Frankenstein monster and plopped in yet another converter. Instead of pumping out web pages, I made it pump out WordPress static pages with no HTML (except for special characters).
We ended up condensing 380 insertions to 86 unique advertisers. We manually categorized each one and uploaded the lot to fredericksburgguidebook.com/guide.
Technically Speaking
My job was only half done. If Cruella couldn’t do the updates herself, my mission would have been a failure.
So, I wrote a user guide: Manage Your Online Directory.
Cruella used it.
The new office manager uses it.
I have more free time.
After years of manually processing documents, I wrote a program that greatly simplifies - and speeds up - tedious tasks such as this one.
Visit www.parsermonster.com for more information.
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September 3rd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Frightening tale! Yikes! Glad your time is back…
September 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
And my hair
Thanks for visiting, Susan!
Cheers,
Mitch