~Jason

BlindDate is a script for transfering files from one server to another server, via FTP, while maintaining file dates.

For people who use Blosxom, the thought if moving blogs to a new server is quite daunting. This is because all the blogs are dated based on when the text file which they originate from was last changed. So moving to a new server gives these files a date of ‘now,’ whenever you copied them. Suddenly you have no archives… all your blogs were written today! Not good.

Some FTP servers can deal with this, maintaining the file dates as each file is uploaded. Others cannot. For those who use a web host with limited servers, my little program comes to the rescue.

How did I make this work? First, I wrote a spider program which traverses all of the files in the old server, and notes their dates. It saves all these file names, directories, and the date to a file. We upload this file to the new server. Then the spider goes to work on the new server, applying all of these date changes to each file.

Pretty cool, eh?

I decided to give it away for free, and it can be found at www.intelliscript.net.

~Jason

Or you can use it to create special announcements pages for products, people, whatever.

Everytime you add a new page, a link to that page is automatically inserted in the home page. You can upload one picture for every page, and it all fits into your template nicely.

Tonight I finally added a demo of HomePage2 in Intelliscript’s ‘Test Area’

Check it out, add a page!

~Jason

~Jason

It’s called “AlbumAdvanced” and you can click here to see it in action.

WARNING: Doing so will also expose you to my beautiful children. Jealousy may ensue.

I took out a bunch of useless features and streamlined it to make it smarter and easier to use. I’m not done… I plan to add an RSS feed to it, as well as an automatic ‘picture of the day’ feature. I’m also going to make it easier to login, upload new photos, and manage the administration features… but that’s for next time.

~Jason

But now it’s awesome— a full-fledged calendar! It shows all of the month’s appointments on one page, and still lets you search, or to display today’s appointments.

Go check it out: http://www.getchurch.org/cgi-bin/read_tabcal.pl

~Jason

http://www.getchurch.org/cgi-bin/search_engine.pl

~Jason

I love automation. 6 years ago I would have had to do that with HTML, and try to remember to delete the new icon after it wasn’t new anymore. How easy is letting computers do all the hard work for you!!?!!

~Jason

It’s an RSS feed which posts the cheapest gas prices in Hamilton. If you live in Ancaster, sorry— I didn’t include the gas stations there, nor in the little towns around Hamilton. I just included Hamilton East, West, North and South.

Here’s the RSS link:

http://www.crookedbush.com/cgi-bin/fetch_hamiltongaspricescom.pl/rss

Here’s the HTML link:

http://www.crookedbush.com/cgi-bin/fetch_hamiltongaspricescom.pl

Let me know if you like it, or if you want any features added.

~Jason

Update: Added a text view if you want it.

http://www.crookedbush.com/cgi-bin/fetch_hamiltongaspricescom.pl/txt

Now it automatically calculates points on each move!

~Jason

You know what I mean? Like, the PhotoBucket site, which lets you choose 20 pictures, one at a time, to upload to their site through a browser. What if it was possible to actually FTP to that HTTP page?

Hmm. That would take some Perl magic.

~Jason

Put this RSS feed in your bloglines account to keep on top of announcements. Talk about painless, eh? Eventually I’ll add a category so you just see announcements for, say, seniors, or youth, or men’s community, etc.

~Jason

The logic for transposing a song is suprisingly complicated. I had to go through the chart a line at a time, looking for lines that had only chords and chord symbols. My assumption: every chord will start with a captital letter between A and G, or a slash (for bass notation). Or a bracket ( to indicate a special chord— or other special characters I use in transcriptions (|,[:,:], etc).

When I find a line with only chord symbols, I convert all the chords to numbers, one through twelve. Then I do the transposition math on them, before converting them back to letters (sharps or flats— depending on your preference).

Maybe sounds easy in English, but try telling a computer to do it.

The reason for this script is to integrate it into ServiceBuilder. Then worship leaders can change the keys for the songs if they wish, and we don’t have to change what’s in the database. The next step is to rewrite the program in Visual Basic. Fun fun fun!

~Jason

Not all web hosts allow server side includes, and many do not provide statistical information about your visitors. You’d like to know who is visiting your page, what route they’re taking through your site, what browser they are using, and what time they were there? Maybe you want to know the sites which are linking to you and which links are generating the most traffic.

Now this is all possible, even with limited CGI access. If you can run basic Perl scripts, and have access to SendMail on this server, CounterMail can retrieve the information from your visitors, and email it to you. You get to choose when the email comes; every visit, after 10 visits, 50 visits, or any number of visits— it doesn’t matter.

Want to show a counter on your page? This script can be called using SSI, to show a simple count of unique visitors. A visitor won’t be counted twice, even if the counter is placed on all your pages.

Call it with an img tag, and add the string /blank.gif to the end of the script to display a one pixel gif. Or, call it with a Server Side Include to show the visitor count.

This is a brand new script, so try it out and let me know what you think. I decided to try using it on ServiceBuilder.net. Cool!

~Jason

FileCABINET is the database script which shows the various programs I have for sale at Intelliscript.net. It allows users to search the database, purchase and make payments with an integrated shopping cart; it generates XML PAD files for software download sites, and lots more.

The two added features are RSS Sydnication and an automated Froogle feed.

RSS (Really Simple Sydnication) allows you to license your content to other sites. It also allows people to subscribe to your content if they want to keep tabs on what’s going on without visiting your site everyday. They can add the ‘feed’ to their newsreader, and this reader will automatically show you when there is new content to view.

FileCABINET lets each script have its own feed (in case someone is interested in subscribing to late-breaking information on any particular script. It also generates a summary RSS feed covering all of the scripts.

Froogle is Google’s integrated shopping search engine. Google asks you to monthly upload a text file containing certain information about your products for sale. Now FileCABINET will generate this file automatically so it’s always an up-to-date reflection of correct prices and information about the scripts.

FileCABINET has only sold one copy— not exactly stellar compared to a script like Auto FollowUp or Crossword (a Scrabble-style game). But it’s becoming one of the most time-saving and efficient programs I’ve written.

~Jason

I’d love to take the credit, but alas, it wasn’t me. A fellow user and programmer— and I guess Scrabble lover— did the real work, and integrated the points subroutines! Pretty impressive.

So it’s not online yet, but will be soon, when I get my act together! Stay tuned.

~Jason

~Jason

(p.s. I use PayPal, and think it’s great, so don’t send me hate email)