Morning image, afternoon image

"I want to show one picture on my website in the morning and a different one in the afternoon".

Doesn't that sound like it's a simple request ... yet - as ever with computing - it raises a whole lot more questions, with a raft of possible answers.

* Do you want the time from the server? Where's your server? One of ours is in California, and the other is in Germany! Or would you prefer the time to reflect where your main customer base is (the UK), or where people are browsing from?

* Do you want to change your HTML every 12 hours to pull in the new image, or to have a URL for the image that changes? Or do you want to run a timed job on the server to switch the image for you? Does it matter??

If you're looking for server or main customer base time to be reflected in the image, the easiest way is to use PHP for the image generation. Here's code to choose between two images based on the server's hour:

$hour = date("G");

$image = "psh1";

if ($hour > 12) $image = "chsid";

and you would write something like:
<img src=/whimg/<?= $image ?>.jpg>
actual HTML.

See a worked example with source code.

Variations:

1. Changing to a different (fixed) timezone is quite easy - use either the date or gmdate functions from PHP and add or subtract an appropriate offset.

2. Timing by browser is a little more tricky. I would identify the country using Maxmind and then work with a table of time zones such as those here and here. Even then, you'll have daylight saving to take into account ...

3. If you prefer to keep your HTML fixed, you can use PHP to generate your image - example (to display a random image) here on our forum.

4. A further variation if you want to change the image but use static images and pages is to use a regular timed job (crontab) to change the file on the server at the correct times.
(written 2005-12-26, updated 2006-06-09)

Associated topics are indexed under

H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling
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  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
  [1495] Single login and single threaded models - Java and PHP - (2008-01-04)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1379] Simple page password protection - PHP - (2007-10-04)
  [1355] .php or .html extension? Morally Static Pages - (2007-09-17)
  [1210] PHP header() function - uses and new restrictions - (2007-05-30)
  [1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
  [1009] Passing GET parameters through Apache mod_rewrite - (2006-12-27)
  [936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
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  [789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
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  [675] Adding PHP tags to an old cgi program - (2006-04-08)
  [603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
  [565] Using PHP to output images, XML, Style sheets, etc - (2006-01-15)
  [537] Daily Image Santafied - (2005-12-22)
  [484] Setting the file name for a downloaded document - (2005-11-03)
  [451] Accessing a page via POST from within a PHP script - (2005-09-26)
  [443] Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser - (2005-09-12)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
  [356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [220] When to use Frames - (2005-02-19)

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Morning image, afternoon image
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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