Questions concerning SQL+MTA+httpd

[bedazzled]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but i'll give it a try.
I have a couple of spreadsheets (*.ods format) and I use them as a "basic" form of database, about ~50 emails, names, telephone numbers from friends etc. and I want to migrate to an SQL solution (which one though?), to do some things more "automagically":
1) Generate html pages from the SQL base and zip them regularly (cron).
2) Exclude some fields from the base to the html pages.
3) Send an automated email via sendmail(?) every christmas and easter to all my friends and something more advanced: send an email to someone, when it's his/hers name day.

Can someone recommend me a good tutorial/howto as I'm fairly new to this area?
Thanks in advance.

[WhimpyPeon]

What you are looking for is pretty specific and I doubt you will find one tutorial that covers your project. If I was going to do it with gentoo I would do as follows:

Install mysql as your database (plenty of information here in these forums).
Install apache and PHP for your web server (be sure to include the cli version of php).
You might want to look into pear mail and pear DB for later use.
Install phpmyadmin to manager your database server.

You can write php scripts that will create your html documents through cron. Php can also be used to create web pages on the fly. I like php because it is easy to learn and relatively powerful and secure if you use it right.

There are plenty of sites that have tutorials on how to write php code. There are also many good books out on using mysql and php for web page development.

Good Luck!

[bedazzled]

[WhimpyPeon]

Perhaps I didn't understand your original post. I thought in line 2 you wanted to generate web pages for publication.

Ignore my post.

As far as php goes dev-lang/php is the new method. You could still use php in your cron job without apache. Look at the upgrade guide and you should be able to get a little information about the different ways of compiling php.

I am now assuming you are using openoffice base as your database. I really don't use that program and don't even know if php can read from it. I am a great fan of mysql and it really doesn't have that much overhead on your system (probably less than a running copy of openoffice). However, for a desktop system I'm not sure it is such a great idea. I suppose you could have it built and only start it when you need to do something with the data. This could be done from your cron job.

If you are only dealing with ~50 names, you could easily get away with a simple comma seperated file. You could then do a little script magic (pick your language... php, sh, awk, sed...) on that text file. That would consume the least overhead of all the solutions.

Sorry for any misinformation.

P.S. Your "small" home server (amd64 3000+, 1GB RAM) would be MORE than enough to do a small web site on apache and mysql with an e-mail server running also. Kind of like hauling a bike overseas on a cruise ship .

[bedazzled]

[WhimpyPeon]

[bedazzled]