Index » This day in Tech : Blob b9bc5b / README.txt
This Day in Tech
This is a set of scripts and console applications that
dump text entries from Tom Merritt's Chronology of Tech
History book for the current day.

https://merrittbooks.squarespace.com/2012/10/17/chronolog
y-of-tech-history

It's a nice bit of geeky fun. The idea of this scripts
was to be able to use it in Message of the Day type
setups.

Download

The binaries are available from
http://kinggeek.co.uk/download in the tdit folder.
The source from http://kinggeek.co.uk/source

Installation
There are console versions that can be/are compiled for
Linux, OSX, and Windows.

It uses an sqlite3 database for it's storage so you need
probably need this installed on your system if it isn't
already. A Windows DLL is included with the windows
binary which should take care of this. On OSX it should
work out of the box. On linux you might need to install
sqlite3. On Redhat type distros something like

yum install sqlite

should do the job. On Debian style distros something like

apt-get install sqlite3

Should do the trick.

Command line usages options for the console program:-
You can copy the database to /etc for linux distros, or
you can specify where to find the db with the -d command
line option. The help from the console app:-

This Day in Tech
Based on Tom Merritt's Chronology of Tech History
Usage: tdit [-d databasefile] [-r] [--help]

-d databasefile : specify the database file to use.
                  Will try /etc/tdit.db or ./tdit.db if
                  not specified or found.
-r              : print a single random entry for the day
                 (otherwise print all entries)
--help          : print this help


Plain ol' PHP

There is a plain PHP version which can be used by
including the edit_functions.php file and calling the
tdit() function:-

function tdit($action)

  returns a string with This Day in Tech Quote(s).

Specify the strings 'all' or 'random' as the $action
parameter to print all entries for today, or just a
single random one respectively.

function tdit_dm($action,$day,$month)

Does as above but lets you specify a day and month. There
is also test script which dumps the whole book.

Joomla Plugins

There is a Joomla 2.5 and a Joomla 1.5> version.

Tested with only  Joomla 3.0 and Joomla 1.5 because that
is what I had access to.

Install the plugin in the normal way. You need sqlite3
php support on your server (usually built in to PHP5+).
To use the plugin, in your content insert

{tdit}single{/tdit}

or

{tdit}all{/tdit}

and the text above will be replaced in an article with
the either a single event for the day or all the events
for the day as a unordered list with the css class
tdit_list.

NB: If you get no output for an entry check the
tdit/tdit_functions.php  file in the joomla plugin
install. The htmlentities function was causing output to
disappear on one server I tried it on. YMMV.


Building the console programs from source

Download the source code from here. Extract the archive
somewhere. I've built successfully so far for 32 bit
linux, 64 bit linux, 32 bit OSX and for 32 bit Windows
(on 64 bit windows).

For windows you need a MinGW/msys setup. Though it should
build easily enough with any C complier.

It just seemed to work on OSX. On linux you need the
usual gcc GNU make etc.

To build:-

cd into the extracted directory.


Just type:-

make -f nameofthemakefilefortheplatformyouron

e.g.

make -f Makefile.linux

And it should all build.

NB: The Makefile.linux32 makefile is to build a 32bit
binary on a 64bit linux system.

Follow the installation instructions to install.


Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License as is Tom's
original work.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Thanks to Tom Merritt for a great project.