Shelley's new Demo Reel Scenes site is now all ready to go.

The technical issue holding us up was how to automate the delivery of the electronic script files to people who paid for them. Her e-commerce site has various references to something called downloadable files, but apparently they discontinued this feature some time ago and forgot to remove some mentions of it.

So we have to implement something on our own. Two ideas came to mind, both based on the server space that I use for my game and other projects.

First, the shopping cart check-out process could provide a link to a third-party server that hosts a database and keeps track of who's allowed to download which files, based on information it gets via LWP perl module from the BizHosting site. But that sounds like a lot of work, and the two systems may not play together well.

Second, have a third-party system that receives a copy of the customer's purchase receipt via e-mail, then sends out an e-mail message to the customer with copies of the scripts carried along as attachments. Simpler for sure, but possibly limited by restrictions on e-mail gateways because of file size. Plus I've never coded anything like this.

Well, it turns out that it's really easy to create a script that monitors a specific e-mailbox and generate e-mail messages with attachments whenever an order arrives. It does this every five minutes around the clock, so delivery of the scripts is only a matter of a couple minutes in most cases. And the files take up little space, so they should have no problem going via e-mail.

I'm convinced that the best way to get ahead in this world is to do something once and get paid for it multiple times, so Shelley has an excellent start here. Little investment in terms of time and money, overall, with unlimited potential.

Go, Honey, go!