This weekend has felt like a bit of a waste, insofar as we’ve barely left the house, but I’ve actually got quite a lot done towards the wedding.

Yesterday I created some admin tools for Edith and I (and potentially anyone else labelled as an Administrator) to use on the web site, the most important being a bulk e-mail system that lets us choose select groups of people to send messages to, such as ‘All guests intending to take the coach’, ‘Everyone who has said they’re not sure if they’re coming or not’ and ‘All vegetarians’. Not only that but we can also use it to do some mail merge-type stuff with names, acceptance statuses and so forth. Never before had I seen just how much fun it would be to be a spammer ;)

Today I’ve been designing, and working out the printing practicalities of, the invitations. It seems that for relatively small (sub-100) runs of A5 postcard-type invitations, it’s very hard to find anywhere that will print them, and expensive when you do. So difficult and expensive is it that we’ve ended up instead placing an order for several printer ink cartridges and plenty of high-quality printer paper on the basis that we can make just as good a job of it, for a lot less money, by doing it ourselves.

This approach also gets around the worry of how to feed the invitations through the printer in order to overprint people’s names, guest IDs and passwords: the whole invitation can be produced from the database now – hurrah!

Unfortunately what I haven’t done this weekend is get beyond a momentary consideration of how on earth to go about setting up our online Wedding List system. It’s pretty much all that stands between now and the site being able to go live – and thus the invitations being able to be sent and the whole thing generally kicking off properly – but it’s a rather daunting obstacle. Which rather suggests that I should get back to it instead of posting to the dlog, really, doesn’t it? :)