Time determines home page

jrdioko · 09-07-2005, 09:12 PM

This might be more of a Firefox question than a Linux software question, but I thought I'd give it a shot here since the answer would probably involve more than Firefox itself. Is there a way to make your home page change depending on the time of day?

Matir · 09-07-2005, 09:57 PM

You could probably create a cron job to edit your firefox configuration file. It's just javascript.

jrdioko · 09-07-2005, 10:11 PM

That makes sense, although I use a laptop and it's not always on, so that would throw off the jobs. What would be the best way to handle it? I guess I could do a cron job every few minutes to check, but that doesn't seem to be the most efficient. Any other ideas, or should I just try to do something like that?

Matir · 09-07-2005, 10:14 PM

You could add an @reboot cron job to test the current time and set it to what the page should be then.

jrdioko · 09-07-2005, 10:29 PM

That'll work, thanks. One more thing... since I'm not too familiar with bash scripting could someone post a quick example that would test the time and, under various periods, change the address field in:

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "www.google.com");

I'll go do the google work and figure it out, but if someone could give me a start on the structure of the cases and changing the file that would be much appreciated.

tomj88 · 09-07-2005, 10:36 PM

You could use javascript directly in the browser to display different content depending on the time of day.. I will try and find something for you...

tomj88 · 09-07-2005, 10:38 PM

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey...user_interface
This changes the background depending on the day of the week, you could try to modify that to your needs.

jrdioko · 09-07-2005, 10:43 PM

I'm not sure I know enough about Javascript either to change that from days to time and set up the cases. Are you saying forget about cron jobs and bash scripts and actually put it as Javascript in the user.js file? Would that get run every time Firefox opened?

tomj88 · 09-08-2005, 09:26 AM

not even in a .js file, you could run the javascript inline within the .html file (or .htm, .php etc). Javascript is interpreted by the browser, so it is run everytime the document is (down)loaded. You would not need a cron task to change the script, because the javascript would only show the wanted page. It would also be possible to do this in php. With Javascript, if the user clicked view source, then he would be able to see the other page's html. With php, because it is processed server side, the user would only see the html that you specify for that time. It would be quite easy in php. I'm not sure whether this would work but here goes!

PHP Code:



<?php 
$the_time = date('a');  
# Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem 
# am or pm 
 
if ($the_time == 'am') { 
  include('morning.html'); # replace morning.html with the page for the morning 
} else { 
  include('afternoon.html'); # replace afternoon.html with the page for the afternoon 
} 
?>

As reference, you may need/want to look here for details on the php date() function. Here, the script is detecting whether it is morning (am) or afternoon (pm). Another way to do it would be to display the page imbetween 10am and 6pm, and any time after that display another page.

PHP Code:



<?php 
$the_time = date('H');  
# 24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 
# 00 through 23 
 
if ($the_time <= 10) { 
  if (!$the_time >= 18) { 
    include('page1.html'); # replace as neccessary 
  } else { 
    include('page2.html'); # replace as neccessary 
  } 
} else { 
  include('page2.html'); 
} 
?>

There is probably a far better way of doing this... To get this to work, you will need a httpd server such as apache with php support...