[GreenKeys] Greenkeys broadcast on Arvada Autostart

[Paul Heller]

I’m just having a bit of fun and keeping my coding skills sharp.

I’ve written a feeder on the Arvada ITTY Autostart channel that prints out the Greenkeys feeds. It ignores the footers and also any quoted text.  Lots of challenges with this one: interfacing to the email servers (both POP and SMTP), handling different encodings  - both content types and character sets (the emails from Juha have been especially timely because they are encoded differently to handle the local language!!), dealing with HTML formatted mails,  learning all about MIME and Multipart messages and how to handle them, translating those to ascii, wrapping the text at 72 characters, struggling to figure out how Python 3 deals with strings and bytes … and a bunch more fun stuff. 

Fun? Well at least it kept me up late several nights and out of trouble. 

I’ll let it run for a while. I suppose there will be problems. One thing I did not tackle was the fact that some of you write in short lines, but not less than the 72 character limit of ITTY. So if you write in 80 character lines, they get wrapped at 72 characters and it looks kind of funny because you have a longer line and a short leftover, long then short, etc

Not too many people listen to my autostart channel - they pretty much stay on George’s feeds. That’s ok. But this option is out there if anybody wants to try it. 

Status of ITTY in Arvada:  Tom is feeding daily mail to ITTY, and has a “news of the day” broadcast on the autostart channel at various times throughout the day. But the Arvada feed remains a secondary service; the primary service remains in Sequim. If anyone wants, I can also broadcast it over there (with George’s permission).

We’ll consider it an experiment for now. Maybe in a week or two it might be declared a terrible idea. But it was a fun project.

Paul
W2TTY