Dan Knight
- 2002.04.29
Last time we coded our PHP to work with our MySQL database and
call up a different Mac of the Day each day.
Testing
After all that, it should have worked the first time - and it
did.
Of course, that wasn't good enough. We'd created a full HTML
page that worked, but we needed to be able to call this up from
various pages on the site. test.html became test.txt, a file that
would be called via Server Side Include - and then it didn't work
any more.
Brian <http://brkn.net/>
and I put our heads together, renamed the file test.php, called it
that way, and it worked. On our server, you apparently have to make
it part of the main HTML file or call it up in a file with the .php
extension.
Then we tried to call the .php file from within a .txt file. We
discovered that our server doesn't want to run .php files nested
within include files. We'd have to modify the code on all the pages
linking to the Mac of the Day to call in first a .txt file, then
our new .php file, and then a closing .txt file.
That worked.
Adapting
The next step was to create a database for the email list of the
day. The biggest difference here is that our list contains both Low
End Mac email lists and a whole bunch run by The Macintosh Guy of
Portland, so we'd need to use a full URL in the database. After
creating the Mac of the Day, this was pretty trivial.
We also link to the Mac of the Day and the List of the Day in
the navigation bar on the right side of almost every page on the
site. Here we don't include the long text description, so we
modified our code to look like this:
- <?php
- $host = "sqlserver.lowendmac.com";
- $username = "MyName";
- $password = "MyPassword";
- $connection =
@mysql_connect($host,$username,$password);
- mysql_select_db(lem_mod,$connection);
- $today = round((date(U) + 32400) / 86400);
- $mod = $today % 89;
- $query = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query("select * from mod
where id = '$mod'"));
- echo "<B><BR>Mac of the
Day</B><BR> <A
HREF=/$query[link]>$query[model]</A>";
- $lod = $today % 38;
- $query = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query("select * from lists
where id = '$lod'"));
- echo "<B><BR>List of the
Day</B><BR> <A
HREF=\"$query[link]\">$query[listname]</A><BR>";
- ?>
Pretty trivial, but we ran into the same problem we'd had with
the Mac of the Day bullet list - it had to be called in as a .php
file. This became very time consuming, as we have thousands of
pages on the site that used the menu.txt navigation file. In every
single instance, we would have to replace that Server Side Include
call with calls to a .txt file, a .php file, and another .txt
file.
Using BBEdit Lite, that was also pretty trivial - but uploading
thousands of changed pages probably took 3-4 hours. I hope we never
have to go through that again.
It Just Works
So now pretty much every page on the site makes a couple of PHP
calls to our MySQL database - once to display the Mac of the Day
and then to display the Email List of the Day. Day in, day out the
server automatically changes this sometime after midnight in
Silicon Valley - even on weekends, even on holidays, even if I go
on vacation.
And isn't that the whole point of computers, automating tedious
tasks?
Next up: Houston, we have a problem.
