I found some cool free tools that let me put together kind of a cool web app starting with no web infrastructure.
https://sites.google.com/view/cedar-shores-social/social-room
- Opened a free Gmail/Google account and set up Gmail for the “Social Committee” at Cedar Shores (our condo complex)
- Created a Google Calendar on the same account for booking the community/social room.
- Created a Google Form on the same account to support on-line booking of the room.
- Created a Google Sheets spreadsheet on the same account to collect and preserve the booking request
- Created a Google Site on the same account to present the Calendar, the request form, and some supporting documention include a PDF file that I uploaded to the Google Drive on the same account
- Created a QRCode
to link to the Google site and put it on a poster to put on the bulletin boards around the condo and to replace both the hand-written caledar posted outside the room and the handwritten binder kept by the office.
That’s all the free Google stuff.
Then the icing on the cake … to allow people without computers and email to book the room, we create a free local phone number with free voice mail using Fongo and put that phone number on the poster and on the webpage.
I had significant help from ChatGPT figuring all this out. I knew Google Sites was a thing long ago but I assumed it had become obsolete or at least irrelevant. But I think this could open a lot of doors, making it possible for all kinds of people to put all kind of things on the WWW without having to use FaceBook/Instagram. Of course some may think that Google is evil too. (“Don’t be evil” was their semi-official motto until 2015 but then they dropped it in favour of the more morally ambiguous “Do the right thing”.) So use these tools at your own risk.