[Remind-Fans] How do you use remind?

[Tom Limoncelli]

I don't use it as a replacement for Outlook, I just use it for simple 
reminders and not-so-simple calculated dates.  For example, I'm really 
happy that it tells me when Mother's Day calculates to be, or Election 
day, and so on.

However, I have done some adventurous stuff with remind.  I built an 
entire "event calendar" system for a non-profit that I work with.   
It's no longer in use (they stopped using it last year) but it worked 
really well as long as it was in use.

The real power of this system was that it was constantly updated and 
yet required almost no work on my part.  This is completely due to the 
fact that the events weren't stored as dates, but as "remind" formulas. 
  The prior system required a person to manually calculate each date and 
copy the event's description over and over.  With remind, we would 
input that an event happened "the first Monday of the month" and 
another happened "every wednesday" and another happened on "the last 
Friday of the month"... and thanks to remind (and cron) the calendar 
would be updated every night no human intervention!

Each "event" is described in a file (one file per event) that look like 
this:

TITLE The Event Title
REMIND first monday of the month
WEBSITE: http://foo.bar.com/event.html
DESCRIPTION
This is the
description of the event.
END


We would extract out all the dates like this:

grep ^REMIND" * | pre-translate | remind | post-translate 
/directory/of/event-files

pre-translate would turn sentences like, "first monday of the month" 
into REMIND commands that would output the date and the filename of the 
event.
post-translate would turn the output of remind into 2 web pages using 
the data in the files when outputting descriptions, etc.

I saved some old copies of the web pages so I could show people what 
they looked like:
	The calendar:
		http://www.bizone.org/events-old.html
	The detailed listing:
		http://www.bizone.org/cal-old.html
The links don't work, but in the live system they linked to the right 
place in the detail page.

post-translate also created a "what's happening in the next 10 days" 
file which we would "#include" on various web pages.

Oh, and we generated an ASCII version that was appropriate for emailing 
out once a month.

My plan was to create a web-based front end that would let 
non-technical people edit these "event files" but I never got around to 
it.  It was easy enough to do the updates with "vi".  In fact, it was 
so easy that the calendar became a community calendar... we listed 
events from other groups and it became a regional resource.

Tom