[RESOLVED] newbie needs help PLEASE!

[php_Newbie2]

Hi everyone,
I am glad to be a part of your community. I am sort of new to php but understand some of the basics. My problem is:
I want to know if there is a way to write php code to email me (on that particular day) everytime one of my html/php pages expires based on the meta tag. If someone would be able to help me with this I would really be greatful.
Thx,
php Newbie

[jansky]

to email you on particular day you may want to use cronjob
and for page expires based on the meta tag.. What will be the content of your meta tag??

[php_Newbie2]

Thx for the reply jansky,
I will have probably 1,000 or more pages with different expiration dates on them so if php could do it rather than cron i would prefer this.
For the tags themselves they will be ordinary expiration tags.
eg; <meta http-equiv="expires" contents="Wed, 04 July 2001 00:00:00 GMT">

[maxpup979]

well you can write the cron in PHP. But what it sounds like you need is a program that tracks all of the expiration dates of your pages. Personally, I would be tempted just to write a spider that walks the site, and stores those dates and pages in a DB. Then have another little program that is called by a cron that simply checks the DB, and emails you about all pages that are expired. All of these things can be accomplished with PHP, even the cron.

[php_Newbie2]

Thx maxpup for replying,
I understand what you're saying but would it be possible to use the if statement like if the server date matches the date in the meta tag "expires" then email

[e-mail]

?
Sorry if my ?s are a bit stupid sounding, I'm still new to php.

[maxpup979]

you betcha. check out the mail() functions on php.net

so you could do if($metatagdate)<=$someotherdate){
#do mail stuff
}

[php_Newbie2]

thx alot
ps: this page would have to be accessed by someone for this to work though right?
if not then it wont work until it is accessed right?

[maxpup979]

unless you set it up in a cron. I usually write my crons in PHP, simply because I am a better php coder than a shell scripter...🙂

[php_Newbie2]

would you be willing to show me an example please

[maxpup979]

if you google for php cron, there are oodles and oodles of examples. for me, I usually just put the cron in /etc/cron.daily or whichever crondirectory was appropriate...then start your script with:
#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

This tells where php is located. the -q supresses the html output. After that, you have your php tags and code.

so it would look something like:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q 
<?php
print "this is my automatic cron thing";
print "isnt this neat";
?>

[php_Newbie2]

hey max thx 4 all your help. i really appreciate it.
BTW do you have im or something we can chat on. if you do will you just email it to me so you dont have to post it on here.