Nearly every month, ASCL editors notify software authors that their code has been registered in the ASCL. Each editor sends out notifications for the code entries she worked on. I say “nearly every month” because I sometimes get behind in the prep work for the notifications, and that delays all editors who send out these notifications. Editors create their own processes for handling this correspondence.

I refer to my process as “hand-crafted spam.” I send out two types of notifications, one to authors who submitted their software to the ASCL, and another to authors for code entries I created. I have standard text into which I add, one by one, the necessary details for each email, by cutting and pasting the info from an Excel spreadsheet I create just for this purpose. I also check the emails against the ASCL entries to make sure I’ve got the right code and author. This sounds laborious, but it actually doesn’t take much time. This afternoon, I sent out 34 emails covering 39 code entries (some authors had two codes added to the ASCL) for code entries processed in February, March, and April, and it took me, working at a steady but unhurried pace, exactly one hour from the first missive to the last.

I’m putting this here to remind future me that this task goes pretty quickly, so, future me, do this more promptly!