Hell Paul,

On Fri 2012-Jan-13 17:23, Paul Quinn (3:640/384) wrote to Richard Webb:

 RW> One thing I've always wanted to implement was a bit of a
 RW> history section, keyed by date.  These go out on Sunday
 RW> mornings, of course.

PQ> Uh, huh.

 RW> This batch would run at midnight utc on Sunday of course adn prepare
 RW> the history information, compiling into it a file that the weekly 
 RW> email generator code would find.

PQ> Okay, I want to look at your system... no scripting at this point...

PQ> The daily files consist of some sort of activity logs?  The weeklies
PQ> consist of a compilation for the previous week?

PQ> I would be looking at a system something similar to...

DO that with station logs, but this is for the whole group.
The weekly file is mainly what vessels have used us and
that's already done.

There are a couple of sections that prepend all this
hwoever, and they're built as well to generate this email.
they're a "welcome newcomers" type section, a logistics, who needs pinch
hitters, etc. section, etc.


 RW> So, taking this Sunday's for example, the batch would look
 RW> in a defined directory for files named 0115.txt; 0116.txt; 0117 ...
 RW> etc.

PQ> Ermm... shouldn't that be 0108.txt; 0109.txt; 0110.txt...  :) 

PQ> (With the system I propose, those files won't be necessary.  The

PQ> weekly file would be built-up during the week's daily operations. 
PQ> They would still be available in the relevant archive if something
PQ> screws up, somewhere.) 

Yep, had to lose the leading 0 in single digit months anyway because when
HOrst's count does its thing it loses it.  I'm
sure you saw that later.

These are still quite relevant as I might not be around.
For example, in April the Birthdays of Samuel MOrse, the
inventor of MOrse Code, and Gugliemo Marconi are both in
files for those dates.
So yes, still necessary as these aren't quite logging
functions per se.  That part's already written and working
great.

PQ> Question.  What happens Sunday 5 February, with the 30th & 31st of
PQ> January's logging?  Do they get caught up in "week0212.txt"?

There's a good example of what I've had to wrestle with for
this part of it.  This thing will go out on January 29, as
usual, discussing anything of significance for Sunday the
29th, Monday the 30th, the 31st, Wednesday the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and finally the
4th.
The "logging" part of this as I say is already done,
automagically, on the fly.  What isn't and has required some manual
intervention by me was looking through these little
text files to find historic trivia to stuff in there.  For
example, had this been built last week it would have noted
that Thursday the 12th was the 2nd anniversary of the big
quake in Haiti.  A few ham ops really used our network
services to get help to people who needed it.  So that would of course be in
112.txt, (was 0112.txt) and would have been
automagically posted in last Sunday's history section.
Except, I never got to looking through those last weekend,
hence doing the automation shuffle .

Regards,
           Richard
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