Fred's Ramblings

The long awaited day has arrived. The NFL schedule for the 2022 season will be released later today and everyone (almost everyone) is anxiously awaiting to see which team will have the easiest or hardest schedule. Which games will provide the most excitement, etc. It wasn’t that long ago when the schedule was announced and the public would not see it until they read the sports page the next day. The release of the NFL schedule did not generate that much interested…think about it. The games won’t be played for another 4 months and by that time, will anyone care?

The football season is now 12 months long, so I imagine that any news is important in that it keeps the NFL in the minds of football fans. Look at the spectacle that Draft Day has become. Televised coverage for 3 days with all the fanfare that they can muster. I can understand the interest in who is selected number one or which quarterback is selected first. But three days? The only people interested in those two other days are the parents and friends of the players that have not yet been selected.

You have to give the NFL credit however…they keep coming up with these “big” days in the 12 month long campaign to keep their brand in the forefront of every football fan in the country. All we can do at this point is wait for the schedule release and then wait for the season to start.

Considering the Los Angeles Dodgers have many of their starters in a season long slump, they have managed to win 20 out of the 29 games played thus far. It doesn’t help that they have now lost series to some of the poorer teams on their schedule, i.e. Arizona, and Pittsburgh. Which leads me to believe that their pitching staff has kept them in the games. Not only have the starters done their job, but the often maligned bullpen has also stepped up and got the job done. The bullpen did not live up to their role in the last game of the series against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and it will be interesting to see if the recent injuries to the bullpen staff will play an important part down the road. We can also assume that the hitters will come alive and start to look like the World Series team they have been picked to be. Time will tell…it would be nice to see them playing for the World Series title in October…or is it November again this year?

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.