ace’s blog

With Meri and Aaron being gone, I’ve been having a mini-vacation. Basically I’ve been doing nothing but what I want to be doing.

Like right now, I wrote a php script to query my contact database, search for upcoming birthdays and if there are any, send me an email (you can try it out here). I’ve had this idea for a while now. I had the database table set up and had some real data in it but I could never figure out how to make it run “auto-magically”. I was going to try to write a function to communicate with Plaxo to synchronize my contacts with them since I know they have a feature that will email you when one of your contacts has an upcoming birthday. After browsing around in the control panel for my websites (and finding the documentation for said control panel), I found out about something called “crontab“. Basically, crontab is a table that I can set up and tell it to run a command whenever I want to. So now I’m scrapping my idea to call the Plaxo API in hopes of communicating with my list of contacts on their servers and I’m just going to use my own functions and my hosts servers. My php script will email me with a list of upcoming birthdays.

Back when I worked at MISG, I created a very small, very basic application to manage a list of contacts. I got it to a certain point, decided it worked “good enough” and stopped developing it. Well now that I have this other piece figured out, I’m going to start developing this system again and maybe in the end, I will have my own little robust contact management system!

I’ve also set up some redirecting for my sites.  Not that anybody besides me ever visits my sites, I just think it’s cool to play with this stuff.  Now, petewood.us/blog, petewood.info/blog and acedanger.com/blog all redirect to blog.petewood.us. 

I’m probably going to obsess about getting this contact thing working as I see it in my mind.  It will be all I think about for a while.  So here’s to great fun with geeking out!