Sorry for the first post. I set my bot up from resources here years ago, but didn't ever need to register. Now I'm asking for help...and don't have a dress...and am not willing to cry about it <sniff>.
I have a small bot in several Catholic channels on EFnet. It doesn't handle any channel functions and isn't even opped. It's main functions are quotes from the Bible, the Catechism, and the Code of Canon Law. It also gives a list of scripture readings for Mass each day, the saint of the day, and inspirational quotes on demand. It uses incith-google (mainly for unit converstions) and parses the title of web links (so people can screen the links before watching.) I think that about covers it
The problem I have now is that I've moved my bot to run from my router so that I can conserve a lot of power when I'm not around.
I had devised this awesome rube-goldberg system when the bot was running on my computer. I set up a cron job to run a bash script each night at midnight. This script would run a C app called "romcal," parse the calendar data from it and write it to a text file. When a person joined the channel, the text file would be read to him as a notice. It would say "Welcome to #<channel>, <nick>! Today we celebrate <Liturgical Day from calendar>. The liturgical colour is <colour>. For a list of commands, type !help."
It was a great workaround to learning how to do tcl and regular expressions. But the architectures of my router and my computer are different and the romcal app will not cross-compile. So the key part of my workaround for an onjoin message just won't work anymore.
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Would it be possible to write a tcl script that fetches the same calendar/colour information from a website or two and does the onjoin message above by itself?
http://www.romcal.net is the original page of the C app, and it includes both the calendar information and colour for the day.
http://www.usccb.org/nab/033010.shtml is a sample from the bishops' website that includes the liturgical day.
and
http://www.universalis.com/ also includes the liturgical day in the top banner.
Any ideas? I'm willing to contribute beer money to a good coder