First off, I just wanted to thank everyone for taking part in this contest. I got far more entries than I was expecting and the feedback was extremely helpful in determining which direction to take with my future blog entries.

Photo By Vetustense Photorogue

Of the six topics that I presented, the order of popularity from highest to lowest was as follows

1. Personal stories about obstacles we face running our business
2. How to guides with respect to building an online store
3. Motivational articles focusing on entrepreneurship
4. Marketing an online store
5. How to increase productivity
6. Ecommerce strategies to boost sales

Thank you for all of your responses. The lucky winner of this contest is….Sophia of www.ellies-whole-grains.com. Congratulations Sophia! I will be contacting you shortly for your address information and have your phone shipped out immediately.

How The Winner Was Chosen

Picking the winner wasn’t easy but it was definitely fun. I hadn’t used my perl skills in a little while so I wrote a little script to choose the winner. The first thing I did was compile a list of all tweets and comments and placed them in an array marked “@entrants”.

Then I used the fisher-yates shuffle to mix up all of the entries. If you have never heard of the fisher-yates shuffle, it is basically an algorithm for generating a random permutation of a finite set or randomly shuffling a set. It was invented by two guys named Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates.

Finally, I generated a random integer and used this integer to pick the winner from the shuffled array. Below is the perl script that I wrote to do this. My wife was telling me the whole time that I was a total nerd for writing this when all I had to do was use a random number generator but what would have been the fun in that? Clearly my wife likes geeks otherwise she would have never married me.


use strict;
my @entrants = (
"list of all entrants"
);
fisher_yates_shuffle(\@entrants);
my $winner = int rand(scalar(@entrants));
print "The winner is $entrants[$winner]\n";
############################################################
# fisher_yates_shuffle
############################################################
# Randomly shuffles an array's contents
sub fisher_yates_shuffle {
my $array = shift;
my $i;
for ($i = @$array; --$i; ) {
my $j = int rand ($i+1);
next if $i == $j;
@$array[$i,$j] = @$array[$j,$i];
}
}


Thank You

Once again, I just wanted to thank everyone for spreading the word and supporting this blog. This giveaway was so successful that I think I’ll do it again. Stay tuned for more free stuff and congrats Sophia!

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