Survey says?

November 22, 2020 7:04 AM

I would like to receive a daily e-mail with a Question of the Day. The question would come from me and answer would be saved for me. Difficulty level: have website with all the bells and whistles that should make this easy. I just don't want to reinvent the wheel.

This should be pretty easy, but it's just beyond my reach. I would rather know best practices for this solved problem than muddle through it and muck it up.

Requirements:
1. Enter a bunch of questions that than get e-mailed sequentially daily.
2. Store those answers, securely.

"Stretch" goals (prioritized):
1. After proof of concept, allow multiple users (less than 100. closer to 10. Think parents, grandparents, kids.)

2. In daily e-mail, add link to "anniversary" answers. i.e. "Would you like to know what you answered to question 'x' 1 year ago? Question 'y' 2 years ago?" etc.

3. If other users are included, allow users to share answers in a granular fashion at any time. For example: to all others, to "mom's side of the family", to "family excluding cousins", "spouse only", "kids only", etc.

I'm guessing I'll have to spin up NoSQL or something similar for the database and than something resembling a cron job to push the questions?

This is largely just a "wouldn't this be fun" idea designed mostly for myself and if I can expand to my family, awesome.

posted by a non mouse, a cow herd to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Are you coding it yourself? Since it's just for you and doesn't need to be super scalable, I'd cobble something together from:

For database - https://sheety.co/ Essentially lets you use a google sheet as a database. See their free level and consider if it's enough for now. There is a number of other services like this you can explore.
For the backend: https://glitch.com/ Free node.js server you can spin up. Technically this is only up while it's being accessed but:
Cron option 1: https://github.com/shindakun/glitchup (if you want to keep the server up all the time). You can also have it hit a specific endpoint that will do the daily sending based on clock?
Cron option 2: https://cronhooks.io/#pricing if you only ever wanna wake the server up once a day to send.
For sending emails: https://sendgrid.com/pricing/, or a similar service.
Hooking up emails responses back to sheets https://zapier.com/apps/email/integrations/google-sheets

Note: you can probably do one or more of the other things in Zapier as well.
posted by pyro979 at 7:52 AM on November 22, 2020

Google Classroom serves exactly this purpose for me, except, ya know, for academics.

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but evidence it has been done, and well.
posted by Temeraria at 7:53 AM on November 22, 2020

Check out IDoneThis; I thiiiiiiink this can be done through that, Altho it’s been a while since I used it.
posted by samthemander at 10:48 AM on November 25, 2020