Local Makers Holiday Gift Giving 2024
Find something scrumptious and creative from Oregon’s product makers to share with your people.
In my business I help product makers overcome their barriers to balance and growth. As part of that work, I am connected to a number of product makers in Oregon from different industries, and colleagues from organizations such as PNW Food & Bev, Built Oregon and Cultivate Bend. Last year Mitch Daughtery, a champion and former executive director of Built compiled a spreadsheet of product makers for gift giving during the holidays. With permission I formatted that list into an easy-to-read-format for my website, launching the first annual Oregon Makers Gift Guide.
This year, to continue my support for this community group of hardworking Oregon entrepreneurs I initiated the project again, and it includes 87 companies(!). I hope to continue in future years, and improve it over time, with photographs, product type filtering, and more. This is my gift to the Oregon product community. Please spread it far and wide and shop local this year.
Happy gifting and don’t forget to treat yourself too!
The Making of A Gift Guide
For those who are interested in what it takes to put this together and the technology involved, here is a brief synopsis:
1) First I created an online form using JotForm, which has improved a ton over the past couple of years to be a Swiss army knife for online forms. And it’s affordable.
JotForm To The Rescue!
JotForm has options for tons of different types of fields and even includes verification of URLs.
2) We put the word out to the online Food & Beverage Group, Built Oregon and other channels.
3) Company owners submitted their listings, which I then downloaded to Excel.
4) Then, I put ChatGPT to work. This is the key to a project like this since ChatGPT can read spreadsheet data and turn it into a Markdown format which can be read on the internet. The listings you see are made of Markdown code embedded into a Squarespace website.
It took a few hours to nudge ChatGPT into behaving exactly how I needed it to, and for me to understand some formatting nuances to giving it data, but together we figured it out. The bonus is that I now have a saved format that I can use again in the future, so a chunk of this work is ready for next year.
ChatGPT, My Collaborator
It’s amazing the myriad ways ChatGPT can be of assistance for projects like this.
5) I worked with ChatGPT to correctly format the content and code, so it would display the titles as links, the categories in bold and all the other formatting you see. This was me giving ChatGPT instructions in plain English.
6) Then, I added the code into a Squarespace code block, organized by sections.
Are you interested in learning more about how you could use ChatGPT in your business or have other questions? Drop me a line and I would be happy to meet with you.
