Daily random selection

[toni]

Hi,

I am quite new to PHP, so my question might be quite an easy one...

What I would like to do is to select and publish a daily random selection of 20 approved links in a MySQL db. I would also like to avoid any repetitive urls in the output. So far, I have been able to make a selection of 20 random approved links.

So, the parts I am missing are: the DAILY updates (and not every the page opens) and the REPETITIVE links that show up...

This is what I have put together:

$dbLink = mysql_connect($DBhost,$DBuser,$DBpass) or die("Unable to connect to database");
@mysql_select_db("$DBName") or die("Unable to select database $DBName"); $sqlquery = "SELECT * FROM $table WHERE approved = '1' AND category = 'category_name' ORDER BY RAND() limit 20";
$result = mysql_query($sqlquery);
$number = mysql_numrows($result);

$i = 0;

if ($number < 1) {
print "<CENTER><P>There Were No Results for Your Search</CENTER>";
}
else {
while ($number > $i) {
$thepix = mysql_result($result,$i,"pics");
$theurl = mysql_result($result,$i,"url");
$thedescr = mysql_result($result,$i,"description");
print "$thepix pics - <a href=$theurl target=_blank>$thedescr</a><br>";
$i++;
}
}
mysql_close($dbLink);

Can anyone help me out? Thanks in advance!

[pnoeric]

to check for daily - you need to make a note that says "only run this script once per day"... or, barring that, a nice trick might be to use the day of the month as a random number seed (with srand); that should produce the same results every time the script is run each day.

to prevent dupes, yo uhave to keep track of what has already been selected. just use another array, $selected, maybe with a crc function to reduce it to a number for the keyo f the selcected array:

$crc = crc32($thedescr);
if ($selected[$crc]) { /* already selected this one; loop around and pick another one */ }
$selected[$crc] = 1;  // mark this one as selected

don't forget to be sure toyu have enough in the db to pick from or else you'll go into an infinite loop after all are picked and none are left :-)

bets
Eric