We’ve been working with the fine collection of people at Consuming Passions for 6 years now on both the Tasting Australia and World Food Media Awards websites. And now we’ve just launched the fourth version of the site.

With a new sponsor this year, the 2007 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards recognises the best writers, television programmes, books, websites … anything to do with media and food really. People have been able to download the entry forms and nominee lists on previous versions of the site, but this year we’ve pulled out all the stops, with an online entry form.

We’ve been working with the fine collection of people at Consuming Passions for 6 years now on both the Tasting Australia and World Food Media Awards websites. And now we’ve just launched the fourth version of the site.

With a new sponsor this year, the 2007 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards recognises the best writers, television programmes, books, websites … anything to do with media and food really. People have been able to download the entry forms and nominee lists on previous versions of the site, but this year we’ve pulled out all the stops, with an online entry form.

Built (of course) using RubyOnRails, the website stores entries in a database. There is a secure administration area for the website that allows Consuming Passions to view the status or entries, do reports on the number of entries, and export that information into a variety of tools. And this is the main advantage of the online entry system over the old paper based system. Previously a number of tracking spreadsheets had to be created, with no real integration between them and anything else. Now, with the information in electronic form already, manual processing is reduced, and the data is more portable, which means that it can be used in any number of situations, something that was much more difficult previously.