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.
quote 1
quote 2
quote 3The following function will take a time part as a single parameter and return a quote.
function quoteByInterval($timePart){
// Make sure it is a integer
$timePart = intval($timePart);
// Load the quotes file
$quotes = file('quotes.txt');
// How many quotes are there in the file?
$quoteCount = count($quotes);
// Figure out the posision of the quote
$position = ($timePart % $quoteCount);
// Return the quote
return $quotes[$position];
}To get the time parts you can use the PHP date() function with different parameters. Here are some examples.
echo date('z'); // produces the day of the year (0 to 365)
echo date('m'); // Month (1 to 12)
echo date('y'); // Year (currently 08)
echo date('W'); // Week (0 to 52)
echo date('G'); // Hour (0 to 23)
echo date('i'); // Minute (0 to 59)
echo date('s'); // Second (00 to 59)To use the function just give it a date part, it will then figure out the rest. Here are some examples.
print quoteByInterval(date('i'));
print quoteByInterval(date('h'));
print quoteByInterval(date('y'));
print quoteByInterval(date('s'));