Learning lots of new things with PHP

One of the important features I would like to implement on RunPee.com is to let a user schedule an email reminder so that they can be prompted to come back to the site and update it. For instance after they see a movie they might want to be prompted to come back to RunPee and vote on a peeTime that they used, or something like that.

First off I have to figure out how to send an email through PHP via Flex. Turned out to be surprisingly simple. My only problem was that I copied some of the PHP code from a tutorial and then wrote part of it myself. The end result was that I called a variable $header in one place and $headers in another. PHP was nice enough to fail silently so that it took a bunch of digging before I noticed the problem.

I posted the code for doing this over at polyGeek.com.

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Beyond that I needed to figure out how to run a PHP script on a timer so that I could check the database to see if there were any emails to send out. Again, this turned out to be very simple. In the Cpanel there's a service called Cron jobs - read a tutorial on it here. That does exactly what I need.

Now I just need to write the SQL and create the UI for entering a reminder. This is one of the few big ticket items left on my 2Do list for RunPee. The other is deepLinking. Which would have been easier to do had I built it in from the beginning but no matter. I'll tackle that tomorrow.