Introducing the BuzzMyBlog.com FREE Contest Winner Picker!
If you've been reading my blog, you know that I don't particularly like contests. I would rather give stuff away for free. In keeping with my philosophy of giving back to the blogosphere, I am happy to introduce the BuzzMyBlog.com FREE Contest Winner Picker. Just because I don't like contests, doesn't mean they don't serve a good purpose. And if you run a contest on your blog, I am sure you will find this VERY useful.
How Does It Work?
It is very simple to use. The Contest Winner Picker (if you have a better idea for the name, please let me know!), allows you to provide a list of contest entires and their chances of winning. The tool will then tally up each entry according to their number of chances and then pick a random entry as the selected winner. Since most contests offer participants 10 chances for this or 20 entries that, the Contest Winner Picker takes all the hard work out of calculating everyone's odds. All you have to do is provide your list of entries as a comma separated text file, and the tool will spit back your winner, along with the odds they were faced with.
What Should The Entry File Look Like?
The list of entries is very straight forward. The tool expects a comma separated text file that has one participant per line. The first value must be a number value that represents the number of chances of winning. Then a comma. After the comma, you can include an email address, a website url, an entry ID, or anything else you need. The tool will just return this entire line so it can be anything you want. All I care about is the first number. You can create your text file in your favorite text editor like Notepad or Textpad. Or you could list all your entires in Excel and save as a CSV file. Just make sure the chances of winning is the first item on the line. Below is a sample of what the entry file should look like.
2, joe@joe.com, http://www.joe.com, Joe's Blog
5, tom@tom.com, http://www.tom.com, Tom's Blog
10, bill@bill.com, http://www.bill.com, Bill's Blog
This file assumes that Joe has 2 in 17 chances, Tom has 5 in 17, and Bill has 10 in 17. It will then pick a random winner between 1 and 17, and return the one line from the file associated with that winner. Once you have your file put together, simply select it using the form below and click "Get Winner". The tool will instantly return your winner. Simple, right?
What's The Catch
There is no catch. As you know, the purpose of my blog is to help out other bloggers. This is just another example. All that I ask is when you announce your winner, please give me a little shout-out and a link back to this post. I would also appreciate a comment on this post so I can check out your contest. That's it. Oh...and don't worry. I am not saving the information or using it for any other purpose. The file gets read from the http request on the fly and once the results are shown, I no longer have the data.
I hope you find this helpful. Let me know if you have any problems or additional suggestions. Without further ado, I present to you the BuzzMyBlog.com Free Contest Winner Picker....
