DailyRiczWest – behind the scenes v0.5
Whew! Bit of a Perl coding session, best summed up by by my twitter comment:
Apologies in advance to “The Ladies” but Perl is like a Burlesque Dancer. Very Sexy and when she does her stuff, you just have to admire ;-)
It’s been a while (probably 1y+) since I’ve coded Perl and it just reminds me what a fickle language that it is! After searching probably 20+ various google searches, I’ve finally figured it all out:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # use strict; use File::Copy; $ifttt_favourites = ".../Dropbox/ifttt/favourites.txt"; $twitter_month = ".../Dropbox/Public/Twitter/2012/apr"; $templates = "../../templates"; chdir("$twitter_month"); copy($ifttt_favourites, "body.html") or die "$ifttt_favourites cannot be copied to $twitter_month"; open(BODY,"< body.html") or die("Cannot Read body.html"); open(NEW_BODY,"> newbody.html") or die("Cannot Write newbody.html"); while (<BODY>) { s/\*BR\*/<br>/; print NEW_BODY; } close NEW_BODY; close BODY; system("cat $templates/header.html newbody.html $templates/footer.html > daily.html"); system("rm body.html newbody.html");
Seems so simple now, but there is so much “noise” about how to code Perl to do even simple tasks like search and replace that it’s a bit mind boggling!
Anyway, I’m almost there with the “automation” (the only thing I had to do was manually edit the Page Title Properties – and that was only because I’m running out of time). I now have a “program” that I can extend to automatically create the DailyRiczWest. The thing that really strikes me about Perl (yet again) is it’s awesome simplicity – it’s just so much work to reach that stage when you’re effectively a novice… Any comment’s on my code are welcome and I’ll soon put it up on GitHub when I have some time, but meanwhile, this at least makes generating my “Papers” a bit simpler.
How this will fit in with Twitter’s “grand new control-oriented plan” remains to be seen, but at the end of the day, I’m just getting a feed from If This Then That, while they are allowed to provide it… How this will fare under the new Twitter API Nazi Regime remains to be seen…