random that changes hourly ?

svoec

I need some help with this one --
I have a database that members can look through.. it has a couple of thousand rows in it, it's not huge (yet)..

I want to offer non members a chance to view a random entry, and since I don't want them to just keep hitting the button few seconds, and scrolling through the entire database, I want to limit it to one new entry every hour

anyone know of a way to generate a seed that will only change every hour (and won't be the same tomorrow, at the same time) ???

right now, this is the code I use to pull a random entry from the DB


############### generate seed for random db #######
srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
$seed = rand(1, 5000);
# Just for my troubleshooting
print "random number $seed <br>";

#############query DB for the random entry #############
$entry = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM info ORDER BY RAND($seed) LIMIT 1"); 
$rentry = mysql_fetch_row($entry);
print $rentry[0];

The only other thing I can think to do is to store the seed in a table somewhere, along with when it was generated, and check to see if it needs to be updated when view is done...

Any thoughts ????

Thanks!!!!

sarahk

"The only other thing" seems like the right idea, especially since you need to know that the same entry wasn't used yesterday.

The flow would be

-- get most recent entry number and time

-- if >= 1 hour then get the entry and display
---- get the entry number for this time yesterday
---- get a new random number and loop until it is different from yesterdays
---- store the new entry number and time <-- rounded to the beginning of the current hour.
-- get the entry and display

svoec

oh -- i was mostly worried that if I used the hour for a seed, then every day at 11:00, you would see the same entry... -- I don't care if from time to time the same entry pops up...

guess i got more programming to do...

I thought some of you might have come up with a really neat way of doing something like that..