Daily countdown

[rhuld]

Admittedly, I'm quite new at PHP scripting, however this one should be very easy for people.

I have a webserver hosted by someone in which I've set up a cron job that runs every 12 hrs, once at 12:05am and once at 12:05pm daily. This job automatically updates certain parts of the website (if there's anything to update). What I need is a countdown to update. Now, how I figure it, I need to get the current server time, find the difference between that time and the next update time, then display on the page in an automatically updating countdown timer, preferrably using inline text instead of a form box. Also note, the cron job frequency might go up or down depending on need (as few as every six hrs, or as long as once a day).

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[devinemke]

the actual countdown display must be done with client-side code (search google for javascript + countdown) but you can use PHP to calculate the number of seconds till the next update.

$current_timestamp = time();
$update1 = mktime(0, 5);
$update2 = mktime(12, 5);

if ($current_timestamp < $update1) {$next_update = $update1;}
if ($current_timestamp >= $update1 && $current_timestamp < $update2) {$next_update = $update2;}

$diff = $next_update - $current_timestamp;

$diff conatins the number of seconds till the next update which can be fed to whatever client-side code is displaying the coutdown.

[wazo00]

Here's what I got:

$hour = date(g,time());
$minutes = date(i,time());
if($hour!=12) {
  if($minutes<=5) $sub=12;
  else $sub=11;
  echo ($sub-$hour)." hours ";
}
if($minutes<=5) echo (5-$minutes)." minutes till next update";
else echo (65-$minutes)." minutes till next update";

Update: Updated script to take into account minutes less than 6.