On Wed, June 13, 2007 4:27 pm, Jim Lucas wrote: > Richard Lynch wrote: >> On Wed, June 13, 2007 12:50 pm, Clint Tredway wrote:
>> Oh, and here's the source I've been using for one web calendar for >> over a decade: >> http://uncommonground.com/events.phps >> >> It's got some stuff you don't need, and is a one-off script rather >> than a fancy full packaged widget to handle every possible calendar >> output known to mankind, but you might be able to use it. >> >> YMMV > BTW: I like the Printer Friendly PDF output. Do you generate that on > the fly? Yes. Here's the source for that: http://uncommonground.com/events_pdf.phps Actually, funny story with that one... The owner used to print up about 200 of these monthly calendars to hand out, much like that PDF, only different. I walked into his office one day, and he was sitting there cussing and copying and pasting and typing, and I asked him what the heck he was doing. I had never even thought about how he actually got those printouts... :-( He's like "Every dang month, I have to re-type the whole calendar in this stupid program and format it and adjust it. It blows my whole day, cuz it takes about 4 hours..." I told him: "Finish it for this month, but you'll never have to do it again." He didn't believe me, until I added that little button to his website. :-) Now 4 hours a month may not seem like a lot, but it does add up to a full work-week a year, and sometimes getting that paper calendar out on time was pretty inconvenient while trying to run a restaurant. It's not like it can be put off a week or two. Well, actually, sometimes it was put off a week, like when the A/C breaks down, or the wind slams the door and breaks out the glass, or the dishwasher breaks or... You'd be amazed how many things can go wrong when you run a restaurant. Then of course, with no calendars handy, we had way too many staff running around asking where the dang things were, and some cranky customers who wanted to plan their nights out. That's bad. We also saved a fair chunk of change every month by weaning people off the idea of taking a paper copy from us and just printing their own from the website. First we stopped putting the paper calendars out in three strategic locations throughout the restaurant, and just had the hostess handing them out at the entrance hostess stand. We then trained her to say "I'm all out, but you can print them at home if you visit our website" If the customer expressed any dismay (or even just displeasure) at that (no computer, no 'net, no printer, whatever) she'd rummage around in the hostess stand and "find" one (from the MUCH smaller stack we printed up) It took a few months, maybe even half a year, but... These days, we print up 6 each month, and hang one by each phone, one at the hostess stand, and one by the sound booth, and that's it. And I had fun writing up the little phrases to label the button. :-) A customer needs one we printed up so infrequently, we just give them one of our reference copies and print another when it happens, maybe once a Quarter. Granted, my computer hacks to shrink font size aren't as pretty as his human judgement as what to leave off, but still... Plus he didn't have the energy to do a thumbnail image for every artist, so that's a "win" :-) So, all in all, that little button saved him quite a bit of money in the long run, and only took me a few hours to implement. Okay, and a few days to fine-tune and the occasional maintenance patch (like today for the SQL injection, oops). I suppose I should fix the reliance on register_globals, but I've always been the "thou shalt initialize all variables" kinda guy with E_NOTICE "on" so I'm not as concerned about that bit. Anyway, the point is that you can often analyze a process and make a significant savings in the stupidest simplest thing. -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
