To create a simple PHP visit counter you will need to create a plain blank text file called counter.txt.

Put the following two functions into a file and include it at the top of any page that you want to have counted.

The following function takes a path as an argument and produces an array of files ordered by their timestamp. The array values are the filename and the array keys are the timestamps. In order to prevent two files that have the same timestamp overwriting each other when the array keys are created with a random number. If two files where created at the same time the least that will happen is that they will swap places every time the array is created as the random number will be different.

To get the class of an element with JavaScript you use the className property of the element object. Take the following section of HTML code.

Printing off a random quote on a page is useful (or at least interesting), but it is nice to rotate them slower than every page view.

A better solution is to use a time based value to work out which quote to display. In this way the quote is changed every hour/day/week or whatever time period you have selected.

Create a file called quote.txt in the same directory as the script and put a single quote on each line.

To get a webpage to refresh every few seconds you can use a meta tag with the attribute http-equiv and a value of refresh. The number of seconds to delay can be put into the content attribute. This meta tag (as will all meta tags) goes into the head section of the document.

Here is an example that refreshes the page every 2 seconds.

It is also possible to make the browser refresh to another page by including the string:

It is sometimes necessary to block people from using your site, dependent on their IP address. A users IP address can be detected by PHP using the $_SERVER superglobal and the parameter REMOTE_ADDR.

To stop access to a directory (and anything in that directory) all you need is a simple RewriteRule.

Splitting an array into sections might be useful for setting up a calendar or pagination on a site. Either way there are numerous ways to do this but the following seems to be the quickest and most reliable method.