Productivity Sauce

As you might already know, I use the Pygmynote script to track tasks, manage notes, and store important bits of information. Most of the time, I access the script from the terminal using an SSH connection. But there are situations when I need to quickly check certain Pygmynote entries from a web browser. To be able to do this, I cobbled together a simple PHP script that pulls records containing the snip tag and displays them as nicely formatted pages.

You can downloaded the PHP script and the accompanying style.css file from the pygmynote GitHub repository. All the embellishments aside, the PHP script is simplicity itself. It uses the PDO driver to establish a connection to the pygmynote.db database. The script then pulls the records containing the snip tag, and displays them as an HTML table:

<?php

$db = new PDO('sqlite:pygmynote.db');
print "<hr>";
print "<table border=0>";
$result = $db->query("SELECT id, note, tags FROM notes WHERE tags LIKE '%snip%' AND type='A' ORDER BY id ASC");
foreach($result as $row)
{
print "<tr><td><p>".$row['note']."</p></td></tr>";
print "<tr><td><small>Tags: ".$row['tags']."</small></td></tr>";
}
print "</table>";

$db = NULL;

print "<hr>";

?>

This dead-simple solution can be used as a bare-bones tool for publishing text snippets on the web. You can even use HTML markup to add text formatting to the records you want to publish.

To make the pygmynote.php script work, you need an Apache web server with PHP. Since the Pygmynote script uses an SQLite database to store data, you also need to enable the PDO SQLite driver in Apache. To do this on Ubuntu or Debian-based Linux distributions, install the php5-sqlite package by running the apt-get install php5-sqlite command as root. Open then the php.ini file for editing in a text editor:

nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Add then the following lines at the end of the file:

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_sqlite.so 
extension=sqlite.so

Restart then Apache using the /etc/init.d/apache2 restart command.

Open the pygmynote.php file in a text editor and specify the correct path to the pygmynote.db database. Save the file and move it to the document root of your server along with the style style.css file. To publish the record you want, add the snip tag to it.