You’ll be pleased to know that I have calculated a winner! I used the power of mighty MySQL to pull all names from the comments table, group by email (to eradicate duplicates) remove those who could not/did not want to enter and randomise the results. Everyone was assigned a number and I save the output as an HTML file (which you can see here.)
I asked the random number generator to give me a number between 1 and 123, and was given 24. That means that Annie (comment is here) of ikillhearts is the lucky winner! Congratulations Annie, I will be contacting you shortly with details of how to claim your t-shirt.
Thank you to all who entered — I got more interest than I expected and the rush of comments in one go led me to discover a few badly optimised bits of code (thanks MySQL max_connections) in my system. Nonetheless it was interesting, and I hope to do it again some time.
01 Jul at 12:55 am
Oh, so you totally went with my method, hmmm?
01 Jul at 4:56 am
Woo scary. It was almost the number 23! Congrats, Annie!
01 Jul at 9:37 am
Kinda :p
01 Jul at 2:15 pm
We needs pictures of the winner posing with her new T-shirt ;)
01 Jul at 2:15 pm
That came out more perverted than expected……
01 Jul at 3:28 pm
@Karl: or before (no shirt) and after (with shirt) pictures :D
01 Jul at 6:13 pm
Darn! I just realized… I’m #24, congrats Annie anyway. :]
01 Jul at 7:40 pm
I can’t believe I won, thanks! @ Karl: I’ll definitely put a picture of me with it on my site when I get it :)
01 Jul at 9:13 pm
Congratulations Annie! Cool contest Jem!
01 Jul at 9:36 pm
Congratulations, Annie! :)
02 Jul at 10:08 am
Congrats Annie, enjoy the t-shirt :) Thanks for running the contest Jem!
02 Jul at 11:06 am
Congratulations Annie :)
02 Jul at 4:16 pm
Not only does she get a tshirt, she gets a plug. I’d almost rather get the plug! haha
03 Jul at 11:16 am
Congratulations, Annie! :)