The Saga of the Wedding Invite

So my partner and I decided we would email our wedding invites, because obviously that is easier than printing, signing, stuffing, addressing, mailing, etc. Simple, yes? But then it occurred to us that we could make a blog site for the wedding where all the info would be in one place, rather than in easily lost/deleted emails. And then it got complicated. 

We created a new email address for the wedding, and then started a blogspot with that email. We know we need funds rather than china and kitchen appliances, so we decided we also needed a way for people to give us money online. And of course, since email and websites are so impersonal, we decided we needed a video of the two of us asking people to come to the wedding. 

I did several hours of research of the best way to receive cash gifts online, and in the end, surprisingly to me, PayPal won. The specific wedding registry sites at minimum were PayPal powered with PayPal fees, and then other sites went as high as 8% fees. Therefore my partner and I created a specific wedding PayPal account. We then needed a link for people to click to give us money. Oh, no, it has to be a button. But there is no "Give" or "Gift" button precoded by PayPal. Had to be a custom. Didn't find an image to our liking, so we made our own in paint.net. Then had to put it into the button code generator for PayPal, and then copy it into the blog site. 

And as for the video, well, that was exhausting. I have a webcam in my computer. We made a test vid, but even less than a minute was too big for Blogspot's Google Video hosting. So, YouTube. Made a special wedding YouTube account, tried to upload test video. A long time later, it was up but played 4x faster than it should have been. We looked like robots on speed. So, our phones, perhaps? Uploaded a test from that. This time the image played right, but the sound was bad to nonexistent. So in the end we let YouTube robocontrol my webcam and recorded direct to YouTube, even though the quality was lower than we wanted. 

Big sigh. Took us probably 14 hours of work all told. I ended up sitting on the whole project for a day or two before I sent out the actual email invite that links people to the website. I was just burned out on it all and needed a break before everyone told us how cute we were and how annoyed that we didn't finish our jokes in our video. 

Next step: creating the spreadsheet to track RSVPs and gifts. I think I'll wait a bit before I tackle that one.