HadToSay.com was a website idea I conceptualized, developed, and independently built into a fully-functioning website. HadToSay offered a unique and innovative way to deliver messages (anonymously if so inclined) to anyone through the use of paper notification cards.
To deliver a HadToSay message, the user would scan a QR code on the detachable "sender" stub of a notification card, which would take them to a page where they could leave their recipient a message, then discreetly delivered the notification segment of the card to the recipient, who would scan the QR code on the card to retrieve their message, and optionally post a response to their sender.
For those users with a printer, HadToSay notification cards could be downloaded from the website as a PDF - which was generated on the fly by the server. For those who did not have access to a printer, or didn't care to bother with printing their own, pre-printed notification cards could be ordered and mailed to the user for a small fee. To efficiently produce the pre-printed cards, I created a server script which would generate a pre-set number of blank message records, then spit out a CSV file with all of the pertinent data which I would then dump into a data-merge template I created in InDesign (see below). I would then send the PDF to Kinkos for printing and trimming - or print and trim myself if I had the time.
HadToSay initially started off as nothing more than a learning exercise I assigned myself to learn how to code. Up to that point in time my technical web knowledge was limited to some basic HTML and CSS. Leveraging the knowledge available through Google and YouTube, I learned how to setup the server, configure the domains, build the database, write the code (PHP/MySQL), and everything else that creating a data driven website requires. HadToSay went through several iterations. First as a mess of amateur spaghetti code when I was first learning. Then I infused some order and efficiency to the code by incorporating what resembled classes and objects. Later I re-built HadToSay as a custom WordPress plugin, before finally rebuilding it on the Codeigniter framework. Initially users would access messages by entering a message id, along with either a sender or recipient pin into a web form to access their message. QR codes replaced the clunky web forms in mid-2010.
At it's peak, HadToSay saw 1,500-2,000 daily visitors, and over the course of it's life amassed over 7,500 registered users. Registering an account on HadToSay was not necessary to use the site, but enabled users to access an inbox to easily find all of their past sent and received HadToSay messages.
In hind-sight I feel that HadToSay may have been a little before it's time. I incorporated QR codes into the functionality in 2010, which was right when the first QR readers were first becoming available to the mainstream, but before anyone knew what they were for. Now that nearly every phone in use today has built-in QR reading capability, and the general public has a better understanding of what QR codes are for, I would love the opportunity to resurrected this project and see what kind of potential it might have.
