Friday invention ideas - 05/09/2008
Running low on ideas this week, long week.
- Coffee flavoured porridge would be cool.
- A active directory of Irish business websites similar to Irishblogs.ie would be excellent. I know there are similar directories already such as browseireland.com. It would be good to incorporate other Irish business solutions, such as Loudervoice to show reviews of business as you search the directory. Attach to Yell if it changes to allow a user to be notified if a site changes. Show their Google Rank, Show how long the website has been online, Show how many pages in a site, now many pages recently updated, any related businesses, how far are they from your current position.
In an earlier blog post of other Friday invention Ideas, I thought it might be interesting to have a Thunderbird extension that would record email stats. I continued to think about this one, instead of creating a Thunderbird extension I created a PHP script to monitor and record emails coming into my POP3 email inbox directly.
Using Cron, I now have a PHP script that checks my email inbox periodically to record details of the emails passing through. The details are stored in a mySQL database. I’m going to let this run for at least a week and then review the stats it records.
I think I will write another PHP script in the near future that will summarize the results with the help of Google Charts.
Here is the PHP code for checking an email inbox and recording some stats, use it for your own email inbox if you like.
To use it, download or Copy & Paste the PHP code and upload it to your server. Use Cron to schedule it to run whenever you like to check your email inbox. I have mine set to run every 15 minutes.
The script needs to be told your mySQL database details and email address details. It will create a table and record the details there. If you have any feedback, let me know!
[...] Friday invention ideas - 05/09/2008 By Gordon Murray log_email_stats_php_script. To use it, download or Copy & Paste the PHP code and upload it to your server. Use Cron to schedule it to run whenever you like to check your email inbox. I have mine set to run every 15 minutes. Developing eWrite - http://www.ewritecork.com/blog [...]
Gordon, your idea for an email stat counter is brilliant. Looking forward to hearing about the results and how they can be displayed.
I wonder would it be possible to build a SaaS product around it? You could have an online service that users sign up to which, based on their selections, will produce a piece of tracking code that they run on their box to log the email.
This tracking code could push up the logged data to their account on your service which could do lots of cool interpretation and represent the results in different graphs.
You could even write a thunderbird plugin to display the graphs inline. There’s a plugin for Outlook that does something similar but none for Thunderbird.
Looking forward to hearing more!
Hi Iarfhlaith,
Cool idea. I wonder would people be nervous about anything interacting with their email though?
I have various scripts and ideas to do with PHP and email. One of em is a PHP script could check your email and remove any obvious spam before it gets to the email client.
Alternatively, It could be used in conjunction with other software to ‘learn’ who your friends are and keep a while list up to date for anti spam programmes like eWrite Forms that protects contact forms on websites.
[...] blog a week ago and there’s some interesting stuff there (with the exception of the invention idea of coffee flavoured porridge! [...]