Managing subscription to events through Google Docs

Introduction

There are more sophisticated ways to let users subscribe/cancel to events, but they are usually commercial and forms in Google Docs could be a good enough solution for most cases.

Forms let users enter bits of information (Text, Paragraph text, Multiple choice, Checkboxes, list, etc.) and data is saved into a spreadsheet.

The form can be accessed either throught its URL or by embedding it into an HTML page (iframe).

Google Forms have the following drawbacks:

• No captcha to prevent SPAM, ie. automated subscriptions
• No way for users to unsubscribe from an event
• Doesn't send a confirmation e-mail, so users can't tell for sure whether they've actually subscribed/cancelled

But it's free, it's easy to use, and again, could be good enough for most users. If you need something richer, there are zillions of PHP/.Net/Java/Python/Perl scripts out there.

Setup

1. First, connect to Google through your Gmail acccount
2. Click on the red Create button on the upper left-hand corner, and choose Form
   
3. In the menu bar, choose Form > Edit the form:
    
1. Change the default "Untitled form"
2. (option) Add some text to explain what the event, where it will be held, etc.
3. Edit the question: Title (eg. "Enter your e-mail address"), Question Type (eg. Text, for an e-mail address), and if needed, check the "Make this a required question"
4. Click on "Done"
5. If you need to remove any unneeded question, move the mouse onto it and click on the icon on the far right that looks like a trashcan
6. Click on Save in the upper right-hand corner, and close the page
4. Back in the main Google Docs page, in the list, you should now see the new form you just created
5. Click on this form, and you'll see its data displayed as an empty spreadsheet. Pretty normal, as no one has used the form to enter any data yet
6. To try the form, select Form > Go to live form. Once done, close the form page
    
7. Back in the spreadsheet, the data you just entered through the form should be available
    
8. To embed the form into a web page on your site, select Form > Embed form in a web page, and paste the HTML code into your page (it's an iframe)
    

And voilą! Poor man's event subscription :-)