Noob needs help with a simple script

MichaelJS

Hi all!

My programming skills are very limited so i'm here looking for help! I need a simple script that will pick a random image and link from a directory every X seconds. I've done the 1st part, but its updating everytime a user refreshes his browser and i don't want that! I want the script to randomly pick a new picture every hour.

This is what i have right now:

<?php
$fcontents = join ('', file ('banners.txt'));

$s_con = split("~",$fcontents);

$banner_no = (rand()%(count($s_con)-1));

echo $s_con[$banner_no];
?>

Please give some hints.
Thank you

paulnaj

Well there may be ways of doing this, but you'll need to be a bit more specific.

At the moment, every time the script runs (and that means on every page visit OR refresh) the code

$banner_no = (rand()%(count($s_con)-1));

is run and hence a new random image is chosen.

Are you saying that every user will see the same image (however it's chosen) or do you expect two different users to possibly see two different images at the same time.

In either case, this is not necessarily a straightforward problem to solve. Can I ask why you want randomly chosen images?

rowanparker

Have a file, store the date in it on a page load.
Next load, check the file if it has passed an hour put in the new date and load the new image.
If you see what i mean?

stndrdsnz

using the function time() you can generate a unix timestamp. Once you have this, store it somewhere you can access each time the page loads. The unix timestamp is an integer representing the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT). All you need to do then is compare the difference of this value to the value of time() and see if it is greater than 3600 seconds, and then execute the code to grab a new image. Don't forget to write a new timestamp.

rowanparker

Yes. That is exactly what I meant just explained better 🙂