Weekly tango events newsletter

[PeterF]

I am setting up a weekly tango newsletter for www.milonga.be, that
lists all the events for the coming week.
The way I did it is the following:
* I installed PHPlist on http://list.milonga.be
* I adapted the layout to match www.milonga.be
* I created the list 'Milonga Tango Newsletter'
* the content of the newsletter comes from a modified PHPiCalendar
script:
http://agenda.milonga.be/newsletter.php
* content includes the last 3 blog posts, the last 5 Flickr pictures
and the agenda from Friday - Sunday (10 days later)
* I use the feature in PHPlist to grab its content from an URL:
[URL:http://agenda.milonga.be/newsletter.php]
* I still have to send it manually on every Thursday, but I'd like to
automate that
* Apparently there's an option in PHPList to subscribe a list to an
RSS feed with a weekly send frequency, I have to look into that.
* I might remove the Flickr images from the mailing list message,
they're probably blocked by a lot of mail clients anyway
* Making an HTML layout that looks +- good in text-only (rendered by
PHPlist) was tricky

[dekaysion]

LOL, I just talked about doing something like this last night. I am
not sure, but in principle you could (not using a cron job) send the
letter out via a user browsing the page, not? Just have a function
query your database for a timer which goes off during a user's visit -
and it promptly sends the newsletter...?

Else: good job on your page so far! ;) And, you lucky guys in Belgium
seem to have a lively and cooperative tango scene. Around here I am
still asked by people where I get all these events and dates for my
calendar.... there is no cooperation between people here, and no
communication between dancers it seems. ;( Time to change that!

Dan

[tob...@tango.info]

> Just have a function
> query your database for a timer which goes off during a user's visit -
> and it promptly sends the newsletter...?

i once had the same workaround in mind. luckily i have cronjobs now,
only need to learn to handle them ;-)

After long waiting for a new mediawiki release, it is out now and I
installed it. I am closer to calender features now. But I do not like
programming ...., hoping some programms good wiki extension.

Also the wiki needs better input interface, especially to call all
people to add [[Category:ABCDE]] where ABCDE is the unlocode, to each
page may be difficult.

I am currently trying that Berlin organisers use the wiki to announce
events. The next will be promotion among festival organisers.

And maybe I can find local editors in Germany. E.g Garrit
(cyber-tango.com) asked m whether we maybe could work together. It
would be one idea to have the wiki as input tool, and generate output
it multiple forms and store that elsewhere. So if wiki goes offline,
at least the old data is still there. I don't want that people rely on
me and I or my server are hit by a stone and they are angry with me.

:-)

--
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin, Germany

http://info.tango.info http://eng.tango.info
http://festivals.tango.info http://videos.tango.info
http://wiki.tango.info