A Mixed Blessing
When amateur radio operators make contacts, they sometimes exchange postcards to confirm the contact. For some this is simply a nice courtesy after an enjoyable conversation, for others those cards are evidence of a contact needed for some sort of award or another. These postcards are called QSL cards.
Printers can provide low cost QSL cards at reasonable prices, but a person needs to order them by the hundreds or thousands. Many amateurs don't make enough contacts to make that worthwhile, and in many cases, you need to choose from a number of designs that may not be as personal as you would like.
For years, I used PageMaker to make the few cards I tended to send out. In conversations over various email reflectors, I came to realize that many hams don't have the computer savvy to piece together the bits needed to make a nice card, and many hams, when presented with a blank piece of paper, simply get writer's block.
Well, I decided that a program for the purpose of generating QSL cards was needed. This also had another advantage. My writing is terrible. With a program, I could convert the data from my logging program and write it directly onto the QSL card. No transcription errors, and the data would be readable.
Anyway, I wrote the program (quite a number of years ago now) and put it on the web as freeware. Of course, there came a lot of enhancement requests, and the program got to be pretty popular. Over the past few years I haven't found the time to work on it, so it has sort of stagnated. But the downloads continued at a pretty good pace, as did email requests for help with this or that, or requests for new features.
A few weeks ago the number of email requests seemed to increase markedly. The web site where the program had been offered had been closed for some time, and I had moved the program to a site where I had more control, and more data, but I hadn't advertised that site very widely. I checked my stats, and the program was collecting 1000 downloads a week.
Well, it turns out that David Rabin, W9PH, had written a very nice article in QST on the program. QST is the journal of the American Radio Relay League, and is the premier journal for amateur radio. David's article was generating a lot of interest. I seem to be on the tail end of getting all these magazines ... this one was apparently out three or four weeks before I saw my copy.
It is a mixed blessing because, although it is nice to see my work recognized like that, I need more emails like I need a hole in the head. But still, it makes me smile.