(auto): Every year about this time, we get around to sending out holiday cards, and every year, I wonder the same thing: How come I don’t have a good solution to keeping all these addresses on file so I can just print up a bunch of labels? Every year I scrounge around for people’s addresses, and wonder who I sent cards to last year, and poke around at various possibilities for personal databases of mailing addresses.

Addresses

Monday 26 December 2005This is over 19 years old. Be careful.

Every year about this time, we get around to sending out holiday cards, and every year, I wonder the same thing: How come I don’t have a good solution to keeping all these addresses on file so I can just print up a bunch of labels? Every year I scrounge around for people’s addresses, and wonder who I sent cards to last year, and poke around at various possibilities for personal databases of mailing addresses. Surely this is a solved problem? It seems like I’ve got to have something right at my fingertips that’s perfect for this. I just don’t know what it is...

Comments

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I have the same problem when I have to invite friends to a party, dinner, rafting trip, skiing trip. I need to start adding labels to the contacts (e.g. "good party goer", "skier", "outdoor person", "concert goer", "relative", "christmas card recipient") so that I can send mass e-mails to all skiers, or to all concert goers I know. Of course, each person would have multiple labels.
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You know what's "at your fingertips?" It is called the address book and a pen. It is what I have used every year when I write out our address cards. It is great this year that I have found a solution that has made this so much easier for me: have you do it!
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There's an interesting looking microformat for this: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

A quick microformat writer would be neat. I imagine it as a set of lightly constrained and simple editors that you could invoke to write to... something. Maybe just dump each one into a big directory on WebDAV, and expect other software to index it.
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This isn't as sexy as Ian's suggestion, but a spreadsheet in Open Office, mail merge, and Avery labels works well for us. I've got to look into the microformat thing....
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Sha has a piece of paper with all the names and addresses and received/sent checkboxes for each year. Low-tech, but it works...for her...
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My wife uses a customized notes db!

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