remind.cgi

Usage (CGI)

remind.cgi

remind.cgi?year=2008&month=January

Description

This is a CGI script that displays my monthly calendars on the web. The real script is hidden behind a passworded directory. (I don't want to share my entire schedule, sorry.) But a sample page can be seen here. In actual use, it runs on my workstation's web server.

If the script receives year and month CGI query parameters, and can make sense out of them as an actual year and month, it will display that month's calendar. Otherwise the current month is displayed.

It's a good example of how mediocre programming skills can glue together very hard work from smarter people into something kind of useful.

• Most important is the remind program from Roaring Penguin Software. It's in the grand tradition of Unix tools: plays well with other programs, a wealth of commandline options, a daunting array of features, a very helpful and smart user community. The datafile format is "almost" a programming language, allowing very flexible scheduling of repeating events.

  There's a remind RPM available for Fedora 8, and that's what I installed. I also installed a 'remind-gui' RPM which contains a (self-described) "cheesy" graphical front end. Although I don't use this in production, it was helpful in figuring out syntax.

• Included in the remind RPM is the Perl script rem2html which produces monthly calendars from the remind output.

• It's a CGI, so of course we use Lincoln Stein's CGI Perl module. This is included in Fedora 8's Perl RPM.

• Also useful are the date manipulation routines in the Date::Manip Perl module. This is available as a Fedora 8 RPM. Most of the "real work" done by the CGI itself are calls to Date::Manip routines.

That's simple enough that almost certainly other folks have done this exact same thing. But I couldn't find one anywhere.

I like this solution, because it's one-click available from a web browser anywhere via a bookmark; I don't need to be sitting anyplace special, or run anything extra.

Notes

A number of things are hard-coded into the CGI script:

• The location of various executables, most notably the rem2html script. This will probably change if there's a version upgrade to remind.

• The location of my remind data file. Also note that this file (and any files it includes) has to be readable by the webserver, which has obvious implications for privacy.

• You can jump to a particular month/year by choosing from a couple of popup menus. The year range is calculated from the previous year through three future years.

• I gussied things up a bit with a style sheet which is pretty easy to play with.

Source

HTMLized Source

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Last modified: March 4 2008 08:26 EST