Dan Knight
- 2002.07.31
Back in the Apple II+ era, my boss bought an Apple II+ system -
and I discovered that I really enjoyed BASIC programming. AppleSoft
BASIC was related to the Microsoft BASIC used by Commodore, CP/M
machines, and most of the others.
The challenge was learning how BASIC worked by modifying
programs, learning how the various dialects worked by converting
them to AppleSoft BASIC (and later Commodore BASIC when I bought a
VIC-20, GW-BASIC on my Zenith DOS machine, as well as Turbo BASIC
and Quick BASIC).
Then I got a Mac, and I stopped programming - unless you count
defining relationships between fields in Excel, FileMaker, and
ClarisWorks programming. I never did get the hang of HyperCard and
still don't understand AppleScript.
I don't pretend to understand PHP. I'm learning slowly, and I'm
much less dependent on Brian and Steve for assistance, but when I
need a fresh set of eyes to find a programming bug, one of them
usually comes through.
I'm learning enough PHP to do what I want to do. And I've
discovered that PHP isn't terribly well documented. A lot of the
sample code I download from PHP.net doesn't work without some
modification, and some of the information is simply wrong. That's
frustrating.
Reading Email
My big programming project for the summer was going to be
writing an email list management program that could handle dozens
of lists while using a single subscription database. Anyone who
runs a few busy lists probably knows the frustration of receiving
"take me off your list" emails from subscribers who don't tell you
which list.
That's one thing my program will address.
But instead of making progress, I've been stuck for almost a
week trying to use the imap_open
function. This is supposed to let me open a mailbox, then read and
display the headers. Using the example on the PHP.net site
(modified for my test address and password), I get error messages
no matter what I do.
This is very frustrating, because I need to have this figured
out before I can go anywhere with the project. And the imap_open
function could also form the basis for creating a personal program
to remove spam from my mailboxes.
More Low End Mac Automation
That may be frustrating, but this morning I began another aspect
of automating things on Low End
Mac.
When we publish new editorial content, we include a list of
recent links at the end of the article. For some content, this is a
generic "recent content" list, but for regular columns, we usually
link to the 3 or 4 most recent articles in that series followed by
other recent links on the site.
This morning I began automating that using pretty much the same
techniques discussed in part 12. The
big difference is a new section that displays the three most recent
articles in that column (such as Mac
Scope - our sample) and then recent links excluding those from
that column.
I'm not going to post all the code, but here are the relevant
parts:
- $get_links = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links WHERE
timestamp <= $rightnow and columnname = 'Mac Scope' ORDER BY
timestamp DESC LIMIT 3");
- while ($array = mysql_fetch_array($get_links))
- {
- echo "<li><a
href=\"$array[path]$array[html]\">$array[linktext]</a>,
";
- $shortdate = $array[pubdate];
- $shortdate = substr ($shortdate, -5);
- $shortdate = strtr ($shortdate, '-', '.');
- echo "$shortdate.
- $array[description]</li>";
- }
-
- echo "<li>More in the <a
href=/musings/index.shtml>Mac Scope
index</a>.</li>";
The first line finds the three most recent Mac Scope columns and
sorts them in descending order by date. The subroutine displays the
column title, link, date, and description. Since Mac Scope is
always written by Stephen Van Esch, there's no need to display the
author's name or the column title (Mac Scope) here.
The rest of the code is almost unchanged from what we came up
with in part 12. The only real difference is excluding Mac Scope
columns:
$get_links = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links WHERE pubdate
= '$latestdate[pubdate]' and timestamp <= $rightnow and
columnname != 'Mac Scope' ORDER BY rank DESC");
The != is PHP's way of saying "not equal," which some
languages write as <> and your math teacher probably
taught you as an equal sign with a slash through it.
Once I had the script working properly, all I had to do was
change the calls that had been made to a manually updated include
file and instead call my PHP script. It works beautifully.
What Next?
For now, I'm pretty happy with how things are working. It'll
take some time to get all of the sections updated with these new
scripts, but there's no big hurry - nor is it a tedious job.
I'd eventually like to work on a submission system where writers
could turn in articles online, maybe even writing some PHP to
analyze content and take a stab at picking the best words to use in
META tags. But there's no hurry.
The next big project will be Email List Automation Using PHP and
MySQL. Assuming I can solve the imap_open problem.
