making randomly loaded banners random

esquivel

Hi,

I'm trying to determine why a simple script to randomly load one of 5 flash banners seems to be repeating the same banner on the ie 5 and netscape 4.75, Macintosh platform.

I've inserted meta tags to prevent browser caching ('<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">)

The script itself, which constructs an array and then chooses a random element to write into the source tag, reads as follows:

<?php

	$flash = array("flashbanners/morphbanner1","flashbanners/morphbanner2","flashbanners/morphbanner3","flashbanners/morphbanner4","flashbanners/morphbanner5");
	$random = rand(0,4);
	$banner = $flash[$random];
	echo "<object classid='clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000' codebase='http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0' width='630' height='104'>";
    echo "<param name=quality value='high'>";
    echo "<param name=movie value='$banner'>";     
    echo "<embed src='$banner' quality=high pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' width='630' height='104' bgcolor='#f5f5dc'>";
    echo "</embed>";       		  
    echo "</object>";
	unset($flash);
	unset($random);
	unset($banner);

The strange thing is that the script seems to do a reasonable job of loading random banners every 2 or 3 refreshes on i.e. 5 and netscape 6 on a pc platform on my off-campus internet connection.

Am I doing all that I reasonably can in my code to make the flash banner source tags random?

Thanks in advance for any help

Anon

Dear Vincente,

What has this to do with the browser platform? PHP is a server-sided language.

But you can try to use a seeded random:

<?php
srand ((float) microtime() * 1000000);
$random = rand(0,4);
?>

esquivel

Thank you for the seeded random suggestion.

The truth is, I didn't know if this had anything to do with browser platform.

I was trying to isolate whether this was a coding (server side) issue or a browser caching issue.

Best,

Vicente

esquivel

Kasper,

Your seeded random idea worked. Thank you for sharing the suggestion.

Vicente Lozano