Manifattura

Manifattura is an organization that manages artistic shows across Italy. They needed an automated way to gather email addresses from the cultural departments of each town in Italy. To meet this requirement, I designed and built a specialized tool known as 'Ravanator'.

The term 'Ravanare' in Italian refers to the action of 'digging radishes,' which metaphorically describes the process of digging deep and searching for something. This is exactly what the Ravanator did—acting as an advanced web crawler similar to a search engine bot. The system automatically visited the websites of Italian towns, specifically searching for and collecting email addresses from the cultural departments. It then stored these emails in a central database for further use.

A significant challenge in this project was designing an algorithm that could effectively find and extract email addresses from websites, which often had varied structures and formats. The crawler was built to handle this diversity by focusing on certain keywords and patterns that indicated the presence of cultural department email addresses.

Once the emails were collected, the second phase of the Ravanator was to integrate an email marketing platform. This included a custom backend that allowed the user to manage the collected emails and segment them for specific campaigns. Additionally, I implemented an HTML email editor with WYSIWYG functionality, which made it easier for the client to create visually appealing email campaigns without needing to write code.

The email editor allowed the client to build and test HTML emails within the platform, providing a seamless experience for creating professional-grade communications. The segmentation tool was another key feature, enabling the client to target different groups within the email list for more personalized marketing efforts.

This project required a combination of skills, including web scraping, backend development, and email marketing integration. The result was an advanced system that not only solved the immediate problem of collecting emails but also provided the necessary tools for mass email marketing campaigns and recipient segmentation.