With great fun and excitement. Depends on what you meen by new data. In some cases, the data you want to see as "new data" will need a date field and in most you'll need a unique and ordered identifier (auto_increment field usually). However, it depends on what you want.
Simplest: Display the last n entries.
You must have an auto_increment field to do it the simplest way. Say you want the last 5 entries (n=5), simply do:
[sql]SELECT * FROM table.Like ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5;[/sql]
This will give you the 5 most recently added rows (assuming id is your auto_increment field, the name is arbitrary but conventional).
Not intelligent but fun: Display the entries entered within a certain time-frame.
I'm being brief here, but if you give the table a datetime field (say
t for now), you make sure that it is filled-out with NOW() (a MySQL function) so it has the time the record was enterred. To pick something in the last day, say, you can generate a date 24hrs old in PHP by subtracting 86400 seconds from the current UNIX timestamp given by [man]time/man and then generate a date with [man]date/man to use in your WHERE clause in SQL.
Intelligent and Lots of Fun: Check for entries since the user last checked.
Now this is fun (and my description is also brief). If your are already tracking users, then give the user a field for "last id checked" and then when they login, just restrict the data fetched in "New ones" to be records with ids more recent then the last one they viewed.
Teehee. I may not have answered your question exactly, but I'm a little wired (sorry, long day). Please let me know where I need to elaborate and I would be glad to help.
