I'm Brett Slatkin and this is where I write about programming and related topics. You can contact me here or view my projects.

19 March 2012

Quilla, a tool for getting emailed

I built a new site: a.quil.la. "Quilla" provides short-links so people can email you for a purpose. Here's an example of a shortlink for email:

You provide a title and a description of what you want to hear about. The site generates a short URL for you to give to people. Folks are required to sign in (with a Gmail account) before they can contact you via the web-form. That's all there is to it.

I built this tool out of desperation. After presenting at a bunch of conferences, I found myself needing: 1) A legible shortlink to my presentation slides, 2) A way for audience members to give me feedback and ask questions later. Behold! Quilla is the solution.

Some bonus treats in how Quilla works: All emails derived from a shortlink have the same sender. This makes it easy to look at all correspondence derived from a single source. Messages also contain what the user saw when they filled out the form, letting you update the shortlink over time without losing history.

If you're wondering, the name is kind of a mishmash of a bunch of things: Feather quills are cool, an Aquila accompanies you into battle, and Laos sold their country code, which means it's fast in the western hemisphere.

Anyways, please take it for a spin and let me know what you think!.
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