I have a website–I Grade Your Paper–wherein I try to sell a service that involves looking over people’s college papers and telling them how to improve them.
The way it currently works, I have them email me their papers. But it would save them a step or two if they could simply upload their paper to me–just click a button on my website and send it right then and there.
How can I arrange things such that they can do this?
-Kris
Very cool service, I wish I knew enough to help.
Isn’t your price a bit low, though? How much time are you putting in per page?
Do you know any PHP? Have an HTML <form method=“post” enctype=“multipart/form-data” action=“path/to/script.php”> with an <input type=“file”> (along with the contact information, etc. for the person). In PHP, uploaded files are in the $_FILES array and you can move them to a permanent place with move_uploaded_file, or just have it fire off an email to you with the file attached. See an example of the former here, or find hundreds more just by searching “PHP uploading files” in your search engine of choice.
That price point averages out at about $22.50 per hour, in my experience. You can see the examples to get an idea of what I do. It’s not close editing. It goes faster than one might expect.
Still, I am thinking about raising the price. All suggestions are welcome as to how to determine the most appropriate price. The way I came up with the $2/page plus $1/paper is I did about 15 papers for free, timed myself, and figured out ways to charge that would have added up to $25/hour. (I lowered it to $22.50/hour in order to be able to use a nice, clean pricing scheme.)
Thanks, I don’t know PHP but this sounds like something I can pick up in a half day or so.
Cool, I guess you are not screwing yourself.
I was just imagining you slaving away and getting less than minimum wage.
Hi there,
I’m a professional web developer, and if you’re struggling to get the file submission functionality working, I can give you a quote to do it for you, if you’d like.
You probably wouldn’t even need to learn PHP to implement this. If your host supports PHP, there are billions of free scripts that can do just this (as BorgHunter pointed out).
By the way, may I make one suggestion? Could you also make your examples available as regular web pages in addition to .DOC downloads? Not everyone would be willing to download and open up a Word file from a stranger, especially while they’re still evaluating your service (due to the wait involved and because of potential macro viruses, however old-fashioned and unlikely they are these days)
The problem with that is that what I do involves, basically, adding a whole lot of footnotes to the paper. This doesn’t show up well on a regular web page. I wonder if I can use google docs somehow though? I’ll look into that.
Convert them to PDFs, which will preserve the footnotes.
This program http://www.primopdf.com/
is one way.
Scribd is another document displayer if Docs doesn’t work out.
Yes, of course but I thought people preferred .doc to .pdf. Do you think I’m wrong about that?
I figured if I have to make them download something, I’ll make them download the smaller file.
-FrL-
which
Yes, absolutely.
Why not offer all the choices?
An example (View online) (.PDF) (.DOC)
Already working on it.
I don’t know. I’m going to offer every option. But I do think the average computer user clicks on a pdf link, waits three seconds, and leaves impatiently. Doc links, it seems to me, open up much more quickly and seamlessly.
check message kelly
For some people and uses, yes, you are incorrect. Word documents may not render correctly or at all if the user doesn’t have the right version installed. Footnotes and other semi-complex formatting can be especially problematic and you can’t guarantee that people will see what you want them to see unless you force them to have a narrow range of versions.
PDF’s tend to solve this problem because they are essentially just images of pages that, in theory, look the same no matter what type of system you view it on. All it takes is a PDF reader to ensure that they see what you want them to see. PDF also has better security in case you don’t want people to just grab your ‘examples’, edit them a little and turn them in as their own. It certainly isn’t a perfect or even a great format either but it does have some advantages over Word documents for some uses like this.
So Frylock did you ever get your website to take uploads? Did your writing advice business make a go of it?
Well the domain in the OP is no longer valid, so either he moved it or the business didn’t make it, it seems. 