rename image

Anon

I am stumped, I need to show a new image daily across the web. My thoughts were to name images as date, 2001-01-14, call them and then rename.
I can't get rename() to do this and really am stumped, I can't see how to store in database unless binary. Any help, or pointers gladly taken.
PHP4 and MySQL

Anon

you could name the file 2001-1-14 for example and create a php file to open and output the file, if it fails to find the file it rolls back a day and looks for a file there. that way just move the image to the directory and name it with the date to be shown. if the image isn't updated it rolls back a couple of days and gets the latest pict offered. why rename the image?

other way is with a database. create a table image (id int auto_increment, date DATE, image blob) and have it pull a random image from the db or find the latest image and show that.

Anon

Thanks Brandon, I am renaming it because that is the only solution I came up with. This is like a daily quote, button type thing, shown on others sites and called for from my server. So by naming this gif 2001-01-14 I can easily find the right image, but I can't figure out how to rename to fit in the img tag which will be on the other sites <img src="http://www.blah.com/today.gif"> This is an animated gif, does that rule out blob?
TIA,
Jim

brandonschnell

doesn't rule out running everything from a mysql database. load your gifs into a table (article http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/william19990908.php3) then have the other sites call your image script like so: <img src="http://www.blah.com/iofd.php?date=today">
then get from the database the right image based on the $date var.

or even have the image of the day script get todays date, open a gif file with that name, and show the image to the user.

otherwise you might as well setup a cron job on your machine that renames the files at midnight. Set files from todays date to today.gif then back again and on to the next file when the clock strikes midnight.

i'll see if i can whip up a demo 1/15/01 and post it.

Anon

this sample will pick up an animated gif file with todays date ie "1-15-01.gif" and show it.

function Image_Error($Err_Msg){
$im = ImageCreate (200, 30); / Create a blank image /
$background = ImageColorAllocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$black = ImageColorAllocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
ImageFilledRectangle ($im, 0, 0, 200, 30, $background);
ImageString($im, 3, 5, 5, $Err_Msg, $black);
ImageGif($im);

exit;
}

Call script using <IMG SRC="http://www.yoursite.com/this_php_file.php">

$file_name = date("n-j-y") . ".gif";
$fp = @fopen("$file_name","r");
if (!$fp) Image_Error("File Not Found!");
$img_data = fread($fp,filesize("$file_name"));
if (!$img_data) Image_Error("No Data!");
fclose($fp);

header("Content-type: image/gif");
echo $img_data;

Anon

Hey great script, after reading it several times (while waking up), I kept getting more anxious to try it out. Typed it into my text editor, loaded it.... and found that my PHP build does not support .gif.
Is there a way around this, I am sure I could redesign the end image as jpg, but I lose the animation. I could find the effect I want with dhtml, but not sure if I can call it in an <img src tag, besides some older browser do not support dhtml.
Maybe I need to let MySQL do the work.
Does this fly? Call the script in <img src tag, get todays date, connect to db get todays date row, display $image...
Gonna go give this a try.

brandonschnell

the script doesn't rely on gif for the output, just for the pretty error messages.

change ImageGif to ImagePNG and see what happens.

Anon

Yep you da man!
That did it alright, thanks alot!
Jim