Letters to Santa
"Letters to Santa" was a micro site that we built for participating malls owned by PREIT.
The site allowed kids to write letters to Santa and Santa would eventually reply.
Santa had a handful of random responses that he sent back to the kids (via CRON job) just before going to bed.
This was a fun little microsite to build. I modeled and handled all of the dynamic functionality, storing the kids' letters, and writing the scripts to help Santa reply in a timely manner.
v2 - latest version
The second version of this site supported around 40 malls rather than the few malls it supported the first year. With that, I was able to clean up and generalize a lot of the code. I also changed the email functionality to use the WhatCounts.com API to help Santa send emails back to kids.
1 previous version
v1 November 2008
The first version of this microsite was only used by a few malls, so it was quick and easy to build for Santa.
Santa was also feeling extra generous in 2008. In his replies he gave kids a secret password that they could share with their local mall's customer service department for a free cookie from Mrs. Claus.