Babel registration automated!

A weekend well spent: I’ve written a plugin that eats CSV (= data directly from the sign-up page) and shits subscriptions- and author registration.

Ergo: from now on Babel registrations are largely automated. I still need to initiate the process manually (so: notify me when new students have signed up) but apart from the copy-paste from google docs everything else is handled by the plugin and – importantly – it handles them in bulk. 1 student or a 100 takes the same time – about 3 seconds.

This plugin also manages updates to existing feeds and authors. So if a student want to change any of their settings (feed, domain, email etc) – they just fill in the registration again.

After churning through all registrations it provides me with an email lists and personalized output for all failed registrations, including detailed reasons for the failure.

Todays registration of the 2014 students brings us to 196 tracked sources, up from 128. A lot of students filled in the registration wrong (most commonly; not providing a feed URL, but their site URL instead). I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that by hand.

posted in Changelog by Ulf Benjaminsson