A home for every day of the week

February 21, 2010 9:03 PM

Is there some combination of PHP/JavaScript/arcane magic that'll let me change sections of a page's content based on the day of the week?

I've been coding myself a lightweight browser homepage with links to things I use every day. One thing I'd like to add to it would be a list of all the various webcomics I read, and have that list change based on which day of the week it is. Is this a pipedream, or can it be done?

posted by andrewcilento to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

You should be able to do what you want pretty easily with php's date() function. date('w') will return 0 through 6 depending on what day it is at the moment your script is run. date('l') (lowercase L) will return "Sunday" through "Saturday" if you're more comfortable working with that.

Use that value in a conditional statement to output the right list for the current day.
posted by wam at 9:10 PM on February 21, 2010

Best answer: You could do something like:

$filename = date('l') . ".php";
if (file_exists($filename)) {
include($filename);
} else {
include("daydefault.php");
}

Then just have a bunch of files called saturday.php, sunday.php, monday.php etc... And one called daydefault.php (optionally, for days which aren't specifically provided)
posted by sycophant at 11:16 PM on February 21, 2010

If you are hosting this on your computer and don't have a local server set up to run php, you can totally do it with JavaScript too. Here's a script that takes you to a different page based on the day of the week:
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/scripts/day.html
posted by beyond_pink at 5:53 AM on February 22, 2010

Response by poster: I think what sycophant mentioned is along the lines of what I'm looking for...I'll give it a shot later and report back.
posted by andrewcilento at 9:25 AM on February 22, 2010

Response by poster: Yep, sycophant wins. Once I realized I needed to capitalize the first letters of the day-of-the-week files, it worked beautifully.
posted by andrewcilento at 3:17 PM on February 24, 2010