[RESOLVED] Super simple question - cronjob and loading a webpage with PHP

BASiQ

Theoretically, I want to use a cronjob to load a php file that remotely visit 5 link in order to increase page views every 15 minutes or so.

Now, I do NOT really want to do that, but to explain exactly what I want to do would take too long so lets pretend that visiting a page from the same IP a million times actually did increase page views. :p

been working on this for a bit, I have no code more or less worth mentioning, nothing I have works and its just basic wget and curl so...

bradgrafelman

BASiQ;10996582 wrote:
so...

.... so what? What's your question?

Weedpacket

Is there a question in there somewhere, or are you just musing to yourself?

BASiQ

Hmm, that was stupid of me lol

In short, how does one do this? I can not for the life of me, figure out what would accomplish my goal.

bradgrafelman

BASiQ;10996590 wrote:
how does one do this?

Do what, specifically? Retrieve the contents of a remote URL? [man]file_get_contents/man would probably be the easiest way.

BASiQ

Well, that should technically work. Was experimenting with it earlier but it seemed that all I ever got was errors with no real results lol. I am progressing in my PHP know-how with trying new things comes more question then answers it seems.

I want to do 2 things
1: Use a cronjob to call a PHP file
2: Make a PHP to file load multiple webpages without outputting.

When I say load multiple webpages, this is where the analogy of pagecounts come in.
I want to of visited the page, but I don't need to ever see it on a screen.

bradgrafelman

BASiQ;10996592 wrote:
Well, that should technically work.

It's not that it should work, but rather it does work.

BASiQ;10996592 wrote:
Was experimenting with it earlier but it seemed that all I ever got was errors with no real results

Well without seeing the code as well as the errors, the best I can say is: fix your errors and it'll work.

BASiQ

Super Simple code

<?php
file_get_contents('www.website-in-question.com');
?>

Error it givez me.

Warning: file_get_contents(www.website-in-question.com) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/sturdi/public_html/bump.php on line 2

bradgrafelman

As the error message states, PHP couldn't find such a file named 'www.website-in-question.com' on the server's hard drive.

Note that you're not using a full URI; you're missing the protocol at the beginning (hence why PHP assumed you were referencing a file path).

BASiQ

yeah, yeah, you can say told you so...

I removed the HTTP because my server was whining about not allowing the HTTP. After reading the HTTP error, it was some stupid php.ini error, which I promptly fixed and whatchya know, it had no errors.

now, how would I run this script using a browser identifier?
It seems the site I am trying to visit did not recognize the php visit as a visit.

<?php
file_get_contents('http://www.siteinquestion.com');
?>

bradgrafelman

BASiQ;10996599 wrote:
now, how would I run this script using a browser identifier?

Do you mean the User-Agent header? If so, one way would be to use [man]ini_set/man to change the user_agent PHP directive.

BASiQ

Well, that worked without any errors, but the site did not register it as a visit. Found a curl script that "may" work like I wanted. Was curious, why would you use file_get instead of curl? Is there a reason for one or the other?

<?php
$agents = array(
	'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1',
	'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100508 SeaMonkey/2.0.4',
	'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; en-US)',
	'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; da-dk) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1'

);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,$agents[array_rand($agents)]);
	curl http://www.websitehere.com
?>

btw, this errors with

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/sturdi/public_html/bump.php on line 3

BASiQ

know what, consider this completed, I know why this is not working, the site in question, needs to be authenticated [logged in] so this will not work. I feel stupid. I will probably just use a batch file instead then. Doh. I feel like a real moron.