Froogle: A while ago I put together a quick little Perl script to build a Froogle feed file for the Joanne Hudson Basics site. If you run PHPShop, and want to easily upload your product catalog to Froogle then here you go: GZip file (2252 downloads, last downloaded 906556 seconds ago)

MySQL Backup: "Save early, save often..." I've been burned enough times to heed that mantra. Nightly, we do a complete backup of all our MySQL databases and then eMail the resulting dump offsite. You might not schedule it nightly with cron like we do, but you might find occassion to use it. Here is our Perl backup script for MySQL: GZip file (1671 downloads)

SQL-Ledger & PHPShop: How to keep inventory insync between PHPShop and SQL-Ledger - that was the challenge. I wasn't interested in building database links, especially since the respective DBs were in different data centers. And, I didn't want to build (and support) some custom replication scheme. So I settled on, basically, using the existing apps. I send the order confirmation eMail that PHPShop generates to a user (procmail rule) on my mailserver. Procmail calls this small perl program that parses the order confirmation, and generates a SQL-Ledger API call to insert the invoice! If you're not running PHPShop this should still give you a very good idea on how to go about building SQL-Ledger API calls: GZip file (421 downloads)

Website Weather: So Jon wanted to put the St. Johns USVI weather on his wedding blog, and needed it to be updated regularily. The MovableType solutions all built static entries that would only be refreshed when he rebuilt the page. I wrote this quick little Perl script to check the weather and write the results to a text file that the PHP blog page would parse each time it was loaded. It's nothing fancy, but it does the trick: GZip file (667 downloads)

File Download Counter: Frustrated by my inability to find a simple to use download counter, to track these (and similar) files, I wrote my own. The download counts on this page are being tracked, in MySQL using this PHP script. It's simple to use, and easy to modify: GZip file (673 downloads, last downloaded 901393 seconds ago)

RSS Feed for SQL-Ledger: A financial manager, at one of my current assignments, was not being made aware (as we was supposed to be) of new sales invoices in SQL Ledger. He needed a better means of being notified that new invoices were awaiting his review, and he was against proactively going to look (as he should really have been doing). So, I created this pl/pgSQL RSS feed generator. The pl/pgSQL function, and accompanying Perl cgi script, are very straight forward - if you want SQL Ledger to notify you about new invoices you're good to go. If you're looking to build an RSS feed from PostgreSQL, for some other reason, this is a great starting point. (12 downloads)

Yahoo! Products: We don't feed Yahoo! Products anymore, so I have no idea whether this still works - but it used to, so it's probably still a good starting point for you. The Yahoo! Products service is very similar to the Froogle service - Yahoo! acts as a product aggregator, giving the buyer (theoretically) an easier means of finding what they're looking for. Similar to how I handled Froogle, for Joanne Hudson Basics, I have written a short Perl script (scheduled with cron) to upload our item catalog. If you run PHPShop this should be (used to be anyways!) plug and play for you (though you'll have to add your own categories). If you're using another store / db format you should be able to modify the script to fit your needs - it's pretty basic: GZip file (1180 downloads)