jt14den / auto-demo-email

Automating messages to trainees for Carpentries teaching demos

auto-demo-email

Summary

R code for the generation of e-mail messages to send to trainees for teaching demonstrations that are part of the Carpentries Instructor Training checkout process. The e-mail is slightly modified from the Carpentries-provided template. Note this will not send any e-mails, it will only create html files that you can use to copy and paste into e-mail messages to send to trainees.

Dependencies

• rmarkdown
• lubridate

Description

Briefly, users provide a data frame of trainees' information with the following columns (all type character):

• last: last name
• first: first name
• email: email address
• lesson_url: URL of the lesson the trainee intends to teach

The R script auto-messages.R should be updated to:

1. Set the value of the trainees data frame to match description above; this can be done by creating the data frame from scratch or by reading in a data file. Currently, auto-messages.R uses the latter approach; the file data/trainees.csv shows an example data file.
2. Set the date and time of the demo in the demo_date variable.

You can then either step through each line of this script (starting by loading in the libraries via the library commands) or run the entire script (after you save it with those updated variables, right?) via source(file = "auto-messages.R"). I'd recommend the former the first few times you try this.

Once the script has run, it will create one html file for each trainee in the output folder; the html includes the message to paste into an e-mail, as well as the e-mail address the trainee provided (it appears near the top of the output html page). By default, the html files in the output folder are ignored by Git; I suggest you leave it that way.

If you are using this for the first time, try running the R script auto-messages.R as-is first, to see the behavior. Once you see how it works, then update values for trainees and demo_date as appropriate.

Caveats

• The e-mail message includes a lesson-specific snippet based on the URL provided by the trainee. These snippets are ones that I have written for demos that I have run but are not exhaustive. That is, there are Carpentries lessons that lack lesson snippets in the file data/lesson-snippets.csv. If you have a trainee who provides a URL for one of those lessons missing a snippet, you will need to write and add this snippet yourself. If this occurs, a warning message will appear in the console, but the html file with the e-mail message will still be created. (there will be bold text in the e-mail message indicating where the snippet should go). If this happens to you, maybe consider submitting a pull request or opening an issue with the snippet information, so that I can update the snippet data file?
• Identifying the correct snippet to use is based on pattern matching of URLs. If an incorrect URL was provided, a match won't be found, and you'll need to add the snippet yourself. You can see the URLs for which snippets are provided by looking at the file data/lesson-snippets.csv.
• Remember, this doesn't actually send any e-mails, you'll need to copy and paste them into your favorite e-mail client and do that part the old-fashioned way :)