[techtalk] Web diary.

[Mary Gardiner]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 10:48:10AM -0500, Laurel Fan wrote:
> A cron job might seem inelegant, but to me, it doesn't look that bad,
> especially since I think that people following it through email don't
> have to be real-time.  Web and email in general have different
> latencies; when I want to see a web page, I expect to get it in
> seconds, but when I email someone, the expected timeframe for a
> response is more like a few hours to a few days.
> 
> Depending on the nature of your diary, it may actually be better to
> run the check-for-updates-and-email-people script once a day instead
> of just sending updates immediately.  This gets you automatic
> digesting.  It allows you to add to your diary throughout the day,
> keeping the web readers up to the minute, without worrying about
> filling up the mailboxes of the email readers.

This is a good point actually.
 
> (Of course, I am probably not the one to ask.  Were I to do this, I
> would combine make, cvs, and the remote execution feature of ssh, with
> a handful of perl/C/bash programs, and probably some "nontraditional"
> programming languages such as octave, gnuplot, or the C preprocessor,
> so that I could type in my entry somewhere, commit it to cvs, type
> make to create the web pages, and use a cvs commit notification script
> to email it.)

CVS and ssh very likely to be involved somehow, actually because I use
them a lot. The entire setup will be mirrored on my own box anyway. If I
reconsider the dynamic regeneration of pages make will be involved
too... but I can't see myself using C for a webpage generation script.

Incidently, how do you do cvs notification scripts (pointer to manual
page find, I know where to find it)?

Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>
GPG Key ID: 77625870