Today, I made a neat little python script to automatically do stuff in my Dropbox based on changes to my Schooltraq account. I decided to call it squire.
At the moment, it does the following:
1. It first polls Schooltraq.com via the api (http://help.schooltraq.com/kb/schooltraq-api/) and gets all of my active (i.e. not archived) assignments.
2. It iterates through the assignments, looking for specific triggers. At the moment, the only trigger is if the assignment name starts with 'Essay on'.
3. If a trigger is found for an assignment, then something happens.
The only current trigger (as said before, when the assignment name begins with 'Essay on') creates a new .tex file in the following place: /Apps/Squire/Homework/<Class name>/Essays/<Essay title>/<Essay title>.tex The is simply the text after 'Essay on ' in the assignment title. The .tex file contains a template with some commonly used packages imported, a page header, and an essay plan. The essay title and author (the dropbox user display name) automatically filled in too.
I have a cron job running the script every hour on my Raspberry Pi, which should strike the balance between keeping things up to date and pestering the Schooltraq and Dropbox servers.
There is a lot of scope for more triggers. For example, if the assignment started with 'research ' then the script could automatically pick put some keywoards and google them, placing popular links in the notes of the assignment on Schooltraq.
On the subject of triggers, it'd be nice if the triggers weren't just from Schooltraqq either, but could come from any API.
I may implement a bloom filter to keep track of what assignments I've already processed so I don't end up wasting CPU cycles, API requests or accidentally overwriting files (though since bloom filters return false positives, this shouldn't be relied upon).
I'll open source the tool soon, hopefully I'll remember to abstract my app secret and API keys into another file behind gitignore. This will have the added benifit of making it easier to change the tool to work with multiple users.