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 and 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.

The World’s Most Indispensable Movie App

The RunPee app tells you the best times to
run & pee during a movie
so you don't miss the best scenes.

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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.

Dan Gardner

Creator and developer of the RunPee app. When something doesn’t work right in the app it’s pretty much his fault. 🙂

Aspiring author. Would like to finish his “Zombie Revelations” trilogy if he could break away for working on RunPee and the cottage he’s building for RunPee Mom.