Email from Static Jekyll sites

I won’t sell it, I promise

Overview

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Sample redirects visitors?
Spam protection
Save forms to a database
Email services
More on front-end software development

This discusses the “A” of the JAM stack - the API called by JavaScript.

Wufoo (Free & Paid Options)
Formspree.io receives forms and emails you using SendGrid’s API. It’s free for up to 1000 submissions per month.
Simple Form (Free)
FormKeep ($19/mo.)
kvstore.io saves up to 100 key/value pairs per day for free. His blog about it

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Amazon Simple Email Service is an out-going service that sends emails from the cloud.

Salesforce provides a service, but it costs $1,000 per year.

Sample redirects visitors?

What we want in our sample is an iframe and async JavaScript so visitors stay on your website. Here’s an example for jQuery:

$.ajax({
    url: "https://formspree.io/you@email.com", 
    method: "POST",
    data: {message: "hello!"},
    dataType: "json"
});

If the example code to paste is a HTML form (such as what FormSpree offers)

<form action="https://formspree.io/your@email.com" method="POST">
    <input type="text" name="name">
    <input type="email" name="_replyto">
    <input type="submit" value="Send">
    <input type="hidden" name="_subject" value="New submission!" />
    ≪input type="hidden" name="_next" value="//site.io/thanks.html" />
    <input type="text" name="_gotcha" style="display:none" />
</form>

your users will be taken to a site owned by the emailer, and may not return.

Spam protection

It’s important to protect your regular email address from harvester bots.

So use a throw-away email address and configure that account to have all emails forwarded to your real email address.

Or pay for sign-up for formspree’s use of a randomized number instead of your email.

Save forms to a database

Email services

send you an email with all the form content, plus enhancements
Lookup the physical location associated with the IP address.
Edit data in a form
Organise data in collections, e.g. to differentiate the user-generated contents from your private configuration settings
store and download data using different formats (e.g. a JSON for a feedback page and a plain-text for a contact form)
query/update your data by another program using a RESTful API.
Statistics such as the number of new entries per day/month, etc.

More on front-end software development

This is one of several topics:

Wilson Mar