I decided to put my ReceiptWallet program on MacZOT! to give it some extra marketing and see how things go. While (obviously) I won’t make as much as if I sold it directly, I’m expanding my customer base. As part of this, I had to implement some new systems in order to handle the orders as MacZOT! gives me a CSV file of orders that I download, insert the serial numbers, re-upload, and then have to send out the orders. I have a MySQL database and php frontend that I use for my normal orders and that works quite well. So I had to figure out the MySQL syntax (I’m still learning it) to import the CSV file into my database as a first step. That wasn’t too difficult, but required a bunch of trial and error. The next part was, “how am I going to send out the registration codes?”. The normal answer would be to write a script to do this. For some reason, I really hate scripting because I’m not familiar with the syntax (AppleScript, perl, php, etc.), so it takes a lot of time to get a working script. So, I decided to write my own “bulk email” program. No, this is not a spamming program. It’s a program that takes the CSV file and a message and customizes each message with info from the CSV file. So, using the Message Framework built into OS X, I was able to whip up the program in about an hour. I even made it so that the fields can be customized and the program can be re-used for when I send out update information or the like. I really should learn some of the scripting languages, but sometimes the quick and dirty way is the way to go.