Birthday Program

At long last, my birthday program is done! You can see it in action on the demo page over here and you can download it here. Basically, it’s just a list of birthdays, but it’s also sortable and easily added to. To quote from my comments in the program:

This is a simple page I threw together to list birthdays and anniversaries, and time elapsed since them. I did this because I could never remember how old some of my friends and family members were, and because I already had this nifty “date_difference” function I found on the internet (see date.php).

This is pretty simple to use, just fill in your names and dates into the data file (see datelist.txt), and the table below will be automatically populated with your data, neatly sorted by age. The table also allows sorting by name or by date. For the date sorting, I had it ignore the year, so that it would group by month and then by date, so you can see whose birthdays are in May altogether, for example.

All the presentation is controlled through the CSS, which you can feel free to edit. A neat benefit of the CSS is that I’m using PHP to set a special class for today’s month and date. Then each row of the table has a class set for its month and date. The upshot of this is that you can display all items from this month in one color, and all items for today in another color.

Bonus points if you caught the “Spirit Journey Formation Anniversary” reference. (It’s from an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode where Master Shake tries to write a new birthday song.)

This is the result of about a month of work, done in tiny snippets, mostly on the train to work. It started out as a simple script I found on the internet, and with some help from Mike at work and from Miles, it’s finally gotten to where it needs to be.

6/21 Edit: I made some minor changes to fix the sorting problem and to correct the vocabulary for singular months and years. The downloadable file has been updates, as has the live site.