home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Current Shareware 1994 January
/
SHAR194.ISO
/
email
/
tad111.zip
/
TAGADAY.DOC
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-08-25
|
8KB
|
171 lines
[ TAGADAY ]
« A Tagline a Day Program »
Version 1.11
(c) 1993 Robert N. Payes
SO WHAT'S A TAGLINE?
Taglines (aka one-liners, fortune cookies, etc.) are pithy little
sayings typically found at the end of messages posted on BBS's. The
growth of message networks such as RelayNet led to the development of
off-line mail readers (SLMR/OLX, BlueWave, et. al) to allow BBS'ers
to read and reply to new messages without the meter ticking. Most of
these off-line readers allow the attaching of a tagline (either
random or user-selected) to the messages they create. More recently,
a subset of programs arose for the sole purpose of maintaining
taglines (such as John Hancock and Tag Line Express). Additionally,
the nets themselves have conferences dedicated exclusively to the
posting, critiquing, and swiping of taglines!
SO THEN, WHAT'S "TAGADAY?"
TAGADAY randomly selects a tagline from an ASCII-text tagline file,
such as the TAGLINES.TXT file included with TAGADAY and either
displays it on your computer screen or writes it to a text file
(either "plain vanilla" text or with ANSI color codes). If
displaying the tagline, TAGADAY waits for you to press either "Enter"
(to display another tagline) or "Esc" (to quit). You can run TAGADAY
from the DOS prompt, or include it in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file for a
smile (or two! Or three!) every time you reboot. BBS sysops can use
the write-to-file option to create a daily tagline file to be
displayed when users log in.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
As simply as possible. If you simply run TAGADAY with no parameters,
it will attempt to use a file called TAGLINES.TXT in the current
drive\directory and set the screen colors to bright-white-on-cyan
(for color systems) or bright-white-on-black (for monochrome
systems). If there's a problem (i.e. TAGADAY can't find the tagline
file), it'll politely quit and display an error/help message.
TAGADAY accepts one or more of the following command-line options:
/help
or
/? Displays the error/help message.
/t Specifies the drive\path\name of the tagline file to use.
For example:
/tc:\olx\tags.txt
will tell TAGADAY to look for the file "tags.txt" in the
directory "c:\olx".
/o
or
/a Writes the selected tagline to a text file instead of
displaying it on the screen. The primary difference
between the two options is that "/a" also writes ANSI color
codes to the text file (you must have ANSI.SYS or an
equivalent device driver loaded in your CONFIG.SYS file in
order to properly display the file). Unless the "/f"
and/or "/b" parameters are set (see below), the color codes
used will be the system defaults.
/f Sets the foreground text color. For example:
/fLIGHTGREEN
/b Sets the background text color. For example:
/bMAGENTA
Acceptable colors are:
Color FG/BG Color FG/BG
────────────────────── ──────────────────────
BLACK both DARKGRAY FG only
BLUE both LIGHTBLUE FG only
GREEN both LIGHTGREEN FG only
CYAN both LIGHTCYAN FG only
RED both LIGHTRED FG only
MAGENTA both LIGHTMAGENTA FG only
BROWN both YELLOW FG only
LIGHTGRAY both WHITE FG only
(Note: All command-line switches and parameters are case-insensitive,
i.e. they can be entered in upper-case, lower-case, or any
combination you feel like. Needless to say, setting the foreground
and background to the same color will make your tagline *extremely*
hard to read! :-> )
THE TAGADAY.CFG FILE
The first time you run TAGADAY, it creates a configuration file
called TAGADAY.CFG, which contains the number of taglines in the
selected tagline file and the file size. Once TAGADAY.CFG is
created, on subsequent runs TAGADAY checks to see if the tagline file
has been modified; if it hasn't, TAGADAY can go right ahead and pick
a tagline out of the file. Otherwise TAGADAY must re-read the
tagline file to get the current tagline count and update TAGADAY.CFG.
Unless otherwise specified, TAGADAY.CFG is created (and looked for by
TAGADAY) in the current drive\subdirectory. If you wish to keep
TAGADAY.CFG in a different drive\directory, you can set the
environmental variable TAGADAY to point to TAGADAY.CFG's location.
For example:
SET TAGADAY=C:\DOS
would look for TAGADAY.CFG in C:\DOS. It's best to place the SET
TAGADAY command in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file; if you're also running
TAGADAY from AUTOEXEC.BAT, make sure the SET TAGADAY command comes
FIRST!
HOW CAN I ADD TO/MODIFY THE TAGLINE TEXT FILE?
1) Do it yourself! Any text editor can be used to
add/remove/edit taglines. This includes EDLIN, EDIT (DOS 5
and up), Windows Notepad, Qedit, Brief, etc. One caveat:
taglines must be no more than 72 characters in length; you
can go ahead and *write* longer tags, TAGADAY just won't
use 'em. (Note: I didn't set these limits, the mail nets
and tagline manager programs did...)
2) Let your off-line mail reader and/or tagline manager do it
for you! These programs either keep their taglines in
ASCII format to begin with, or allow you to dump the
taglines to a text file.
HOW MUCH DOES TAGADAY COST TO REGISTER?
Are you kidding? :-> I banged this together in two weeks for my own
entertainment (and to further teach myself Turbo C programming). If
you have as much fun running TAGADAY as I had GETTING it to run, I'm
a happy camper.
REVISION HISTORY
August 11, 1993 [v1.00]: First public release of TAGADAY.
August 16, 1993 [v1.10]: Added "/o" and "/a" options (thanks to
David Kaufman, sysop of Brooklyn Broadcasting System BBS
[RIP], for the suggestion).
August 17, 1993 [v1.11]: Minor bug revision; rewrote screen/file
output routines to better scale the frame to tagline size.
SEMI-LEGALESE
The TAGADAY.EXE program and TAGADAY.DOC documentation file are (c)
1993 Robert N. Payes.
TAGADAY is being distributed as freeware. You are permitted (nay,
encouraged!) to pass copies of this program to friends, colleagues,
and bulletin board systems. TAGADAY may be included on disk
collections of public domain/shareware/freeware in which a minimal
disk-copying fee is charged to the purchaser; any other fee
collection in regards to the program is frowned upon (unless you kick
back some to me, ho ho!)
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS?
E-mail:
Running Board BBS 718-654-1349
Moondog's Free BBS 718-692-2498
Off Hour Rockers BBS 908-591-2673
Snail Mail:
Robert Payes
1070 Bloomfield Ave. 1C
West Caldwell, NJ 07006
CLOSING REMARKS:
Calm down, it's only ones and zeros.