Monday, June 05, 2006

TEA Website Administrator Skills (2)

Hardware requirements:
  • A Mac, Windows or Linux/Unix computer
Software requirements:
  • Email, FTP and SSH clients
  • Python 2.3 or newer
  • A decent ASCII editor (Notepad or platform equivalent)

Optional:
  • A decent programming editor such as BBEdit, Textpad, EMACS, etc.
  • An HTML editor such as HTML-Kit.
Even more Optional (never necessary):
  • deluxe HTML editor such as NVU or Dreamweaver.

Network requirements:
  • Full-time internet connection
Optional:
  • An at-home internet connection

Friday, June 02, 2006

Rebol's out; Python's in

Until now, I've been sending the TEA Times using a free but closed-source scripting engine known as Rebol. It's cross-platform, which has allowed me to send emails from Windows, Mac or Linux machines (depending on where I happen to be sitting).

No more. A one-page Python script now does the job quite nicely, and with far less overhead than the Rebol engine requires. The list of recipients is still in the form of a flat text file; one of these days I'll break that list into three -- for Transit, Wastewater, and Other.

Business Meeting Notes

The May 17 Business Meeting notes have been transformed into the usual .pdf file and uploaded for your inspection.

Here's the link to that file.