Pun Salad

[November 2019: sources moved to GitHub]

Awhile back I replaced the (increasingly unwieldy) monthly archive section over there in the right-hand column with a yearly archive section: one link per year that Pun Salad has been in existence. Each link takes you to a yearly calendar, which, in turn, contains links to the monthly archives (when you click on a month name) or daily posts (when you click on a day). Example output here for 2017.

The code to generate those calendars is embedded in the (very) special purpose CGI script that powers Pun Salad, but I thought the calendar generation code might be of interest to people.

Notes:

• The script is run with a single year argument, and produces HTML on standard output.

• The Perl module Time::Piece does most all of the heavy lifting for the necessary date calculations. It probably breaks down for years far in the past or future; I haven't messed with that too much. I tested that it gives the same calendar for 1901 as the Linux cal command does, so that's good.

• The HTML::Template module is used to specify the HTML framework for the calendar. Obviously, that's where you might want to customize the appearance. The code assumes the template resides in your top-level ~/Templates directory.

• The calendar is a table of months; each month is a table of days. This means, of course, that the generator is essentially a four-deep nested loop. Eek! A voice from my old structured programming days said: "you really shouldn't nest loops that deeply". So I broke out the month-generation into a Perl subroutine, and now I feel better about myself.

As usual, this is not earth-shattering code, but I hope someone finds it useful, if only for tutorial purposes.