Google Docs lets you really easily create web forms, which are great for surveys, site feedback and more (and importantly free). However responding to submitted forms can be a little more difficult as your data just ends up in a big spreadsheet.

Luckily you can use a spreadsheet formula to easily create a ‘Reply’ email link for each submitted form using these steps:

1. Create a google form. Make sure that you create a field on your form to collect an email address.
2. Open your forms spreadsheet and select the very top cell of an empty column to place the ‘Reply’ links in.
3. Insert =HYPERLINK(“mailto:”&TRIM(B1),”Reply”) into the cell (bold text only) replacing the text ‘B1’ with the top cell of the column that contains the email addresses from your form.
4. Click the letter at the top of the column to select all of that column’s cells and press CTRL + D to fill the formula down to all the cells.
5. Go to the view menu and select ‘List View’ to make the links easily clickable.

Unfortunately you cannot automatically populate the subject and body of the email. Whilst google spreadsheet supports ‘mailto:’ urls it doesn’t support the ‘?subject=’ and ‘&body=’ extensions.

Chris Pietschmann has a great article on a simple namespace manager. He states that if your using an AJAX framework you should obviously use the namespace management that it provides. However his code is perfect for my situation where I don’t have my AJAX framework loaded yet but do need my namespaces defined.

Anyway the reason for the post is that I refactored Chris’s code into a smaller recursive function:

/// Create the Namespace Manager that we'll use
///to make creating namespaces a little easier.
if (typeof Namespace == 'undefined') var Namespace = {};
if (!Namespace.Manager) Namespace.Manager = {};

Namespace.Manager = {
    Register: function(ns) {
        if (ns.length > 0) {
            myBaseNs = ns.substring(0, ns.lastIndexOf('.'));
            this.Register(myBaseNs);
            eval("if(!window." + ns + ") window." + ns + " ={};");            
        }
    }
};

I was looking into compressing JavaScript files and came across this JavaScript compressor by Dean Edwards. On the site he offers a .NET port by Jesse Hansen, which I have just ‘hacked’ to recursively duplicate a directory with the .js files compressed. I say ‘hacked’ as it was a bit of a rush job, but it seems to work. It also lets you put in a ‘header’ which allows you to put an author/copyright notice at the top of each of the compressed files. The dupicate folder is created in the same location as the orginal and named the same as the original with ‘_packed’ appended.

The original code is covered by a ‘GNU LGPL’ licence, so I’m posting my modifications here for anyone who might need or want them. I made my changes in Visual Studio 2008 so if you want to open the project you will need a copy (the free/express version should work fine). You will also need the .NET framework installed, I think the installer will prompt you to download it if you don’t already have it installed.

Download (source & installer): DirectoryPacker2.net.zip