Quite a few weeks ago I completed an application to submit your birthday boy or girl for Z@ppelin. It features birthday cake recipes, on-the-fly PDF generation, party downloads, and features all jarigen for any given day. It’s pretty cool. The best part of it: every day three people are selected to appear on national TV!

Z@ppelin used to have an app like this as a separate application. I tightly integrated it into the Z@ppelin codebase. Cheers all around, as the editors don’t need to work in a separate CMS any longer.

The coolest part though is that some people are randomly selected to appear on TV. This item “Jarig op Z@ppelin” is broadcast a few times per day during children’s TV. It is insanely successful. After the selection, the lucky few are rendered for TV fully automated. As far as I know, this process is unique. Every day a company called Automo fetches the people who have their birthday in the next month. Their hi-res pictures are grabbed from a secure URL. The text, selected by the submitter, is grabbed as well and everything is rendered into broadcast-ready and delivered automatically to the final broadcast destination. Everything in this process is digital, even the eventual on-air facilities. And no human intervention required. Sweet.

On the day of broadcast, my application grabs a low-res version of the video from a secure location and sends a link to this video to the parent who submitted the child. This parent can then download the video herself for a limited amount of time. This is done to prevent abuse and strangers downloading the video.

It’s been running smoothly for a time now. If you have a child in the age of 1 – 6, feel free to submit him or her for jarig op Z@ppelin!