Fred's Ramblings

Many of you know that I am always in front of a computer and have been that way for the last 35 odd years. And that is in fact the truth especially now that I am retired. It wasn’t anything that I thought I would be doing, but things have a way of turning out.
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Now that I have returned to FlatPress as my blog software of choice, I have been trying to figure out how to send email notifications when a new blog is posted. There are plenty of examples online on how to do this but in 95% of the instances, the code works with a database driven blog system. FlatPress is a flat file based system meaning that it is somewhat more difficult to pull the blog titles from the text files housing the blog post itself.

I found a script that seems to do just that however…it updates the blog titles and then sends out the email notification using a “newsletter” document to notify all of the subscribers that a new blog has been posted. One small detail is left out however…the email notification has to be triggered by the administrator, it is not automatic as I would like it to be. It works by reading the rss feed that is part of the blog system site and checks to see if the titles match the titles that were there the last time a notification was sent out. If there are no changes, no email is sent. I am in the process of “tweaking” what the email looks like and just as you might expect, different email servers display the email differently. As an example, Outlook (hotmail) does not show the blog title link as clickable and one of the other email servers does not display the image that is part of the newsletter. Practice makes perfect however, and who knows…I may be able to figure out how to have the notification sent out automatically. I can dream, can’t I?

Blogmaster

I have been looking for a script that will allow subscribers to this blog to receive email notifications when a new blog post has been added. I have been told to use the RSS/Atom option that the system provides, but if the user doesn’t have an RSS reader, all he will get is a file that will have to be opened in order to see what the contents are. What is going to make it difficult to implement is that the posts are inserted into files, rather than a database and up to this point, I have not been able to figure out how to set up the email notification. I will keep trying however, if for no other reason than to learn a different aspect of the php language. Wish me luck.

I noticed this blog system a few years ago and even installed it on two different domains. One domain was running php version 5.6.x and the other one php version 7.4.x. In both cases Flatpress ran with no problems. I started using it and then thought that if the blog system became popular, the fact that it is a flat file system would eventually slow it down. Based on that assumption, I started looking around for a database driven system.

As you might expect, there are quite a few database driven blog systems out there. Some are open source but most of the “good ones” come at a price. Not knowing if the blog was going to be popular enough to warrant paying for it, I decided to stick with some of the open source systems. Well, as you notice I am back to using Flatpress because it is definitely the better one of the ones that are out there. So, I will keep at this and see what happens.