Need script concept dev help

zzz

Hi,
Currently I have a script that des the following:

A member posts an article. My current script adds the article to articles table in db and right after, while all article vars available, looks through other table "readers" and emails an alert to those reader that matched a particular criteria.

As reader table grows I start to notice a slowing down of my script. I think I want to change and move away from instant alerts to perhaps once a day.

I suppose I need to leave the first script to only store article. Then add another script that will run through a cron job and do something like this:

check for articles that were posted yesterday
build a list to be included in a message
then check for readers that match
-- maybe store their IDs in an array and then run a loop and email

My problem is: different articles amy match different users, say based on the following:

age
gender
city

Ideally what i need is say femail readers in say, Dallas, age group 20-30 get a message about the following articles posted: Article 1 and Article 7.

Need help understanding the process requierd to acieve what I'm trying to do.

mikell

Ok this is the vaguest question I have attempted to answer so far, plus I'm very drunk (there should be a smiley for that), so take this with a grain a salt...

Overall Process:
1. write the script that will email your "readers" about new articles.
2. create the cron job that will run that script daily

Here is some pseudo code as to what your script should do (my best guess):

//get all articles posted yesterday
$articles_array = getArticlesPostedYesterday();

//loop through the articles
foreach ($articles_array as $article){
//get all users that care about $article
$usersThatCare = getUsersThatCareAboutThisArticle($article);
//loop through users that care about $article
foreach ($usersThatCare as $user){
//email users that care about $article
emailUserThatCaresAboutArticlePosting($user, $article);
}
}

Hope that helps.

zzz

Assuming there's only one article, yes I should be able to get it done. The problem is there are might be a number of articles that may match different groups of readers.

So, instead of sending one article at a time and running a risk of sending multiple emails to the same user, I would like to sort those articles according to matching criteria and send once.

The problem I see and am not sure how to tackle is building a list of possible combinations of criteria and then sending ti to the appropriate group of users.

halojoy

categorize your articles
it may be keywords( like in blogs ) to hint what article contents
let readers rank those categories by their interest of keywords
say from 1-10, if you have 10 categories

then you can select x number of articles that have a good match
and email to your readers

people are different, from some strange reason

if you try to predict: this age and this gender is interested in this
then it tells more of your own ideas of people, StereoTypes
It is a prejudge made by you

Individuals are individuals and different to what anyone may think in advance
A female may be more interested in cars, than a young boy.

City, location, on the other hand
generally may be a valid 'pre-judge' criteria
... the closer to our location something happen .. the bigger news for us.
But who knows what relatives somebody has got in a certain place?

Regards

zzz

Well, I called them articles but it's not really news. When the item is posted poster actually specifies the criteria to match the potential respondents (gee now it starts to sound like a matchmaking site, which it is not...).

So matching is a piece of cake. Article posted has criteria attached. Readers have criteria set in their profile.

How to get it sorted out is where I'm lost.

Say I run a script and collect info on all posted article a day before. That step is needed fro sure. Then I need to bunch them up somehow by, say:

gender M/F
age group
and then start attempting to email while matching those that are in geo targeted area.

I've done some odd coding before but this one is a bit over my head. Here's an example:

Say I have 5 articles:

Article 1: M, 20-30, Boston
Article 2: F, 40-60, NYC
Article 3: F, 40-50, NYC
Article 4: M, 20-30, NYC
Article 5: F, 20-30, Boston

Clearly here I can put Article 2 and 3 in one email if my recepients live in NYC and are femails ages bw 40-50.

It starts to sound a bit too complicated... I'm starting to lean towards an alternative solution: run a cron script once every ouple of hours and if detect new post match respondents and email. That way I'd space the posters a drag they experience right now.

halojoy

zzz wrote:
How to get it sorted out is where I'm lost.

Say I run a script and collect info on all posted article a day before. That step is needed for sure.
Then I need to bunch them up somehow by, say:

gender M/F

age group
and then start attempting to email while matching those that are in geo targeted area.

I've done some odd coding before but this one is a bit over my head. Here's an example:

Say I have 5 articles:

Article 1: M, 20-30, Boston
Article 2: F, 40-60, NYC
Article 3: F, 40-50, NYC
Article 4: M, 20-30, NYC
Article 5: F, 20-30, Boston

Clearly here I can put Article 2 and 3 in one email if my recepients live in NYC and are femails ages bw 40-50.

It starts to sound a bit too complicated... I'm starting to lean towards an alternative solution: run a cron script once every ouple of hours and if detect new post match respondents and email. That way I'd space the posters a drag they experience right now.

Bunch them up.
Question is what you bunch up?
People or articles?

I have never liked to be bunched up with others
.. not by my gender and certainly not by my age ( I am old )
neither by my hair color, race or religion or my location.

- The techniqal PHP side of it, is STEP 2, and is an implementation of your good idea
- The coding is not so complicated, using sort and grouping
and QUERY your database
- Once you get started writing your script, it will be less of a problem
- You will see this

One thing though:
Important to have good data stored = information, in a good format.
If data itself is bad or stored in a questionable way, format
then it does not matter how good script is
... there will be issues/problems.

Cron Jobs.
There is not needed to use 'cronjobs'.
You can simply make a db table,
that stores a timestamp of last update/action.

Whenever somebody runs, connects to, 'index.php'
this timestamp is matched against current time.
If your time interval has passed, the action is performed.
Wont work on dead site.
But then it is no big thing, is it?
Because this website has less of importance.

Regards 🙂

mikell

Ok if you don't want to mess with grouping them, I would suggest the "brute force" method below, which
doesn't require grouping and should guarantee that no user is emailed more than once.
All you have to do is fill in the functions.

//get all of your users' emails
$usersEmailAddresses_array = getUsersEmailAddresses();

//loop through the email addresses
foreach ($usersEmailAddresses_array as $email){
//get all articles that this user might care about
//(that were posted yesterday), using whatever
//method you want to determine that
$articlesThisUserCaresAbout_array = getArticlesThisUserCaresAbout($email);

//contruct and send an email to $email using the relevant articles above
if ($articlesThisUserCaresAbout_array is not empty)
{
	//function that will email an announcement to $email 
	//about the articles user with email = $email cares about.
	notifyUserViaEmail($articlesThisUserCaresAbout_array, $email);
}

}

note: I'm assuming no two users will have the same email address.

"When in doubt, use brute force." ~ Ken Thompson

zzz

Thans all for suggestions.

No, the site is not "dead", yet. But I think I'd rather schedule a cron job sometime at night, when the server load is less.

I agree, once I start working on a script it'll become clearer what needs to be done. I like the brute force suggestion too, however I'm not sure about putting thousands of emails into an array. Perhaps i could just run a loop from db... I'm still conceptializing... too many fires to put off before I get to this project, but it's good to have it simmering on the backburner of my brain for now.