Seven Gates – Search and Find Function

While waiting for advice in regard to the best way to count aggregate user activity, and while waiting for inspiration in regard to a failed attempt to create a generic PHP class that will handle status variables, the hiatus in desired development has been filled with less important, but still desirable new functionality — namely, a search and find function for the Seven Gates newsletter.  Just as one can search podcasts by number, so too can one now search for a specific edition of a Seven Gates newsletter.

In addition, in an effort to avoid sending the Seven Gates newsletter and other Grammar Captive correspondence into an unsuspecting user’s junk box Grammar Captive now enjoys SPF and DKIM protection, and is waiting for its DMARC protection to propagate across the internet.

It has been a very busy weekend.

Roddy

Integration of New Podcast Data with Newsletter

Although not yet visible, each week’s new podcast data have been fully integrated into the Seven Gates weekly newsletter template.  Preparation will now begin on readying the newsletter for individual and mass mailing.  The second to last major hurdle before podcast production begins.

The last major hurdle will be an accounting routine to keep track of the popularity (or lack thereof) of individual podcasts.

Roddy

First Important Accomplishment in 2018

The first step in integrating each week’s newsletter with each week’s podcast has been achieved.  Using MySQL prepared statements to insure security the data for a single newsletter and the data for each podcast referenced in the newsletter have been amassed on a single page.  This code can handle any number of podcasts.

The next step is to produced a completed template — namely, fill the template with the data just amassed and prepare it for mailing.

Roddy

Happy New Year 2018!

In celebration of the new year Grammar Captive is proud to announce a 46 percent increase in page views with a secure connection, and a 40 percent increase in page views with an unsecured connection during the final month of the solar new year just concluded.

These recent increases have returned Grammar Captive to the trajectory that was so rudely interrupted by circumstances in late July of 2017.  If things continue to move forward as they have during the final quarter of the just passed year, Grammar Captive will launch its first podcast during the second half of the month of February, 2018.

Roddy

Different Context, Different Technique

Have just completed the first successful upload to the Seven Gates newsletter data tables.  What I thought would be an easy task turned into a full day’s worth of work.  What worked for the podcasts, simply would not, could not work for the newsletters.  It has been a painful lesson.

In any case, the next step is to create the routine that fills the Seven Gates newsletter template with new values for each new edition.  Hopefully this task will proceed smoothly now that the enhanced newsletter entry form and data tables correspond.

Have a great week!

Roddy

In Celebration of the Winter Solstice

Today hosts the longest night of the year; it is also the day that I completed the restructuring of the Seven Gates newsletter’s data base.  Except for the assignment of a foreign key on one of the newly modified tables, things moved ahead fairly routinely.

The restructuring was the result of just one of the many new things learned during the four months spent developing the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast host page.

We are one step closer toward integrating new issues of the newsletter with newly created podcasts.  When completed the Newsletter will become still another source of direct access to the newest podcast.

Roddy

End of the Year Metrics (Preliminary Report)

Slightly past the mid-month mark of December 15 Grammar Captive is proud to take note of the following:

The number of unsecured pages already viewed on December 17th beats the total number of pages viewed at the end of the month of September by 2%.  On September 30 Grammar Captive recorded 6,673 views for the month of September alone.  Only seventeen days into the month of December Grammar Captive has already recorded 6,811 views for the month of December.

The number of secure Grammar Captive pages viewed during the month of November was 1067.  As of today, Sunday, December 17, 2017, the number of pages viewed for the month of December has already reached 1,197 — a 12% increase, and there still remain a full two weeks of viewing!

If this is what traffic looks like without substance, Grammar Captive is very hopeful about what traffic will look like with substance.  Maybe, just maybe, fourteen months of effort is beginning to show promise.

It is the lot of the entrepreneur.  He takes a risk, works hard without pay, and hopes for the best.  Unlike government that creates new government jobs from private sector jobs that it destroys with taxation and the servicing of government debt, the entrepreneur creates new jobs derived from his own effort.  It is the entrepreneur that makes an economy grow — not government!

Roddy

Exhaustion and Delight

So inspired and exhausted by the recent technical achievements a long overdue break of sorts was taken.  And, in the spirit of Christmas it was decided to perform a little “tree decorating”.  What did this include?

  • A new addition to the Grammar Captive main page — namely, a section on the nudge.online business model.  It can be found under the heading Other in the Grammar Captive navigation bar.  If you ever had any doubts about what Grammar Captive is truly about, you will not want to miss this new section!
  • A complete overall of the section on Internet Security as previously announced.
  • Alphabetization of the list under Other in an effort to make it appear less haphazard.
  • Elimination of the use of the scope attribute in the CSS/HTML <style> element.  The entire element was replaced with a dynamically loaded CSS stylesheet.  This insures formatting consistency across browsers.
  • Grammar Captive has now been tested with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.  Internet Explorer has always been a very large, other world for your host.

While returning to the heavy tech stuff this week will be devoted to integration of the Seven Gates newsletter and the Grammar Captive weekly podcasts.

Although an archive for the newsletters is already in place, there is no mechanism to access them methodically as one is now able to access the weekly podcasts.  This seemingly large task will be put off until after podcast production begins.  For, after all, only the truly dedicated will want to read stale news, and Grammar Captive is still not a proven success.  Furthermore, podcasts are far more easily distributed and will likely reach a far larger audience by the very nature of their medium and content.

Roddy