A Day in Paradise

This afternoon, I whipped up a script to archive and mail out blog entries every evening using Dada mail.

Jake from Utterly Boring, set me in the right direction, and I used this article as a starting point.

Right now my script sends multipart (text and html) messages, and archives either the html or the text, whichever you choose.

Since just about everyone uses mail clients that support html mail, I didn’t bother worrying about text only email, but it can very easily be hacked in. I’m still running tests, but it does work, so if anyone wants to help test email me and I’ll send it to you.

The script is meant to be run from a command line, so you need shell access to make it work. It is meant to be run as a cron job.

The script has the following options.

    --list           The short name of the list
    --list_address   The address of the list
    --my_address     The address of the administrator
    --html_page_url  The url of the html page to send
    --text_page_url  The url of the text page to send
    --subject        The subject you want the message to have
    --archive_html   Use this option if you want the html version archived
    --archive_text   Use this option if you want the text version archived

An example command line would look like this

    ./mt-send.pl --list='daily' \
                 --list_address='list@example.com' \
                 --my_address='owner@example.com' \
                 --text_page_url='http://example.com/daily.txt' \
                 --html_page_url='http://example.com/daily.html' \
                 --subject="Headlines for `date +'%B %e, %Y'`" \
                 --archive_html