Response-O-Matic

It's not very often that I write about technical subjects. I leave that to PC Medic. I have been investigating how you could put in a form into a blog so that you could ask other people to submit information to you without having to give them your email address.

A lot of digging around and a search in Blogger help pointed to Response-O-Matic, a website where you can create a form to your specification, then incorporate it into your website or blog. The information submitted into the form is sent to your via email, but the email address is not visible to the people who fill in the form.

Their website claims that the "form wizard will have you up and running in about 8 minutes". Well, it's true. The steps were quite easy to follow and there was a lot of flexibility in the form design elements you can choose from - standard fields, text fields, radio buttons, tick boxes, etc...

I needed a bit of extra help from them, when the form I had created was displaying too low in my post, with a lot of blank lines in front of it. I couldn't figure out why, so I contacted their support team. I got a reply that evening, pointing me to a setting in Blogger that was causing extra blank lines. So, after that extra tweak, it worked beautifully.

All of that for free! I was thrilled with the product and with the service.

Here is the result: MHBD Scratchpad

All without any programming, just a bit of HTML copy and paste, and using Blogger's new design elements to make it look nice. (And a lot of searching around the web to actually find this tool!).