For the past few years ABCNJ has been using a popular online ticket service to handle registrations. It’s worked well, even though the interface was a bit outdated, but now this service has almost doubled its price and it forced us to look elsewhere. My search for alternatives lead me to Ticket Leap, which is comparable to our old service, but has a much better interface ¹.

The one thing Ticket Leap does not do as well as our old service is data handling. Reports are more sparse, and I can’t limit the data sets I retrieve from the service. This meant I’d have to deleted any unwanted columns before passing the report on anytime the office needed an update. To say I have better ways of spending my time is a under statement.

To deal with this deficiency I decided I’d create a simple database which would import only the columns I wanted. From there I could create the reports I knew we would need. It took me a good bit of Tuesday to think through the design ², and a bit of Wednesday to refine some rough edges ³, but now I have what I want. The result is a single table database which can create name tags ⁴, generate a list of registered attendees, and export a simple CSV file to a user’s desktop in case further customization is desired. To make things easier, I also created a clean landing page with buttons to activate these different reports. I then put the database on our server so the users who need to access the data will be able to access it without going though a middle-man ⁵.

I’m kinda psyched by the end result. I’m going to work on setting up an auto import for data but it’s usable right now. And generating name tags has never been easier. It’s been a lot of fun to create.

Yes. That makes me a nerd, but I think I can live with that.