Banner rotating image script and remote working

Warlock

Hello i found on internet how to make rotating image banner,but i would like to know how to load on remote place like forums and similar.For example,i would like to someone who load site with my signature or whatever each time see different image on different link.Since forums and similar services allow linking on images directly only,is that possible to do?

englishtom

I think Iv seen this done before using a .swf flash document as a signature.. other than that I dont think you will be able to do it, especially not with a script

bretticus

Warlock wrote:
Hello i found on internet how to make rotating image banner,but i would like to know how to load on remote place like forums and similar.For example,i would like to someone who load site with my signature or whatever each time see different image on different link.Since forums and similar services allow linking on images directly only,is that possible to do?

Certainly! And probably easy to do as well. I'm not gonna write code for you here, but here's how to do it.

You need a way to scan your directory of random images. If you have PHP5 you can use scandir. If you are using PHP4, check out "Example 2. PHP 4 alternatives to scandir()" on the same page. Make sure you remove "." and ".." from the array: str_replace should work nicely.
Once you have an array of image filenames, you'll need to pick one at random: array_rand() should work great for this.
Since you are doing this in a php script, the script itself is your image src
```
<img src="http://yoursite/mypic.php">
```
. This means you need to tell the browser it's an image. You can do this with header(). For this example, let's say your images are all jpegs.
```
header( 'Content-Type: image/jpeg' );
```
.
Now you'll need to load your random image into memory: imagecreatefromjpeg() accomplishes this for you.
Now all there is left is to display the image: imagejpeg()

That's it.

bretticus

OK, so I had to try this out. If this forum didn't check headers when you try and submit a URL to an image, this would work. I send it Content-Type: image/jpeg but some of the apache specific headers get written first and this forum rejects the URL even though I used

<Files "/icon.jpg">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

in my .htaccess file. Anyways, here's the code. You can try it in other forums and see if it works for you.

My php file (/icon.jpg):

<?php
define("ICON_PATH", $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/icons/");
header( "Content-Type: image/jpeg" );
$dh = opendir(ICON_PATH);
$files = array();
while (false !== ($filename = readdir($dh))) {
	if ( strpos(strtolower($filename), ".jpg") !== false ) {
		$files[] = $filename;
	}
}
$randomkey = array_rand($files);
$im = imagecreatefromjpeg(ICON_PATH . $files[$randomkey]);
imagejpeg($im);
?>