Thinking about Christmas? We’ve a New Groupon UK offer from the 13th September!

We’re always delighted to work with Groupon, and this offer is no exception. There will be an opportunity to take up this offer until 2nd October, so plenty of time, and nice and early for Christmas!

Groupon offers like this have proved particularly important to the restoration project as they have brought us to a much wider market in the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Without Groupon for example we would not have been able to move forward with the Conservation Plan as quickly, nor provided the match-funding for the restoration of the bridge.

For more information on what we are planning we have books, a Lairds and Ladies site, as well as the Dunans Castle Limited site.

(And for those of you who wonder about the technology which underpins our endeavours, we use a self-hosted WordPress blog, the wp e-commerce plugin and some very nifty proprietory addons to both – which enable both these offers and our other online operations.

We’re always innovating technically of course, and that’s one of my skills – I find the manipulation of mysql, php, css, etc. to make us a more efficient operation endlessly fascinating … for example, I have just realised that when entering voucher codes into our database, creating individual queries for each code is much more efficient – reducing input time from three hours to half an hour – more time to concentrate on the restoration project!)

 

Thank Groupon Its Friday! Yes, we’re up to our knees in another Groupon UK Promo …

… beginning tonight at midnight, we have another UK promotion of our River titles. Not only that we’ve also been prepping Swedish and Danish campaigns while also fulfilling Norwegian and Finnish orders. Which is great because we also just heard that our architect, Robin Kent is about to start work on the first of our listed building consents for the Castle.

Scan-140704-0001-Changeable

On another front, while entering the codes for the promotions, I’ve been designing new signage for the Drivehead. Not of course to replace the Dunans Castle sign, but to give clearer instructions to folk visiting. Right are the initial sketches …

And because it is Friday, and the photo amuses me greatly, here’s Barty bouncing through the Bluebells this May!

All the codes are in for Groupon promotions to Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark for the #ScottishLaird project

One of the major jobs needing done for every promotion we do with groupon is the generation and insertion of several thousand codes – now of course we automate this as much as possible, but the final task of loading the codes into the database is mine. It takes a while, maybe ten minutes a thousand codes and with this promo we had 8,000, so a good hour and a half with distractions, but its done now for the wonderful Nordic nations – time for a cup of tea and a Borders Biscuit.

And the image? Well, that’s the file with all the Danish codes formatted into a SQL query ready for copy and paste into phpmyadmin.

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