Oct
7
(2005)
It’s the Week of Things Working Again. First the Flickr albums via FAlbum, and now the rotating banner image, via “Automatic Rotator.”
It’s a simple php script that you put in a directory of images, then every time it is called, it spits out a random image file from that directory. I modified my css file to point the background of the banner div to that script, so every page view automatically gets a random image. To add a new image to rotation, I just drop it in the directory.
Again, if you don’t feel like hitting command+R a couple dozen times to see them all, just hit the handy dandy Banner Image Lister – another simple script that dumps out all files in a directory (including the rotator.php, which will appear to duplicate one of the images at random, and the index.php file itself, which will appear as a broken image).
Thanks to Cole for some gentle nudging to get me to put this together, and thanks to Automatic Labs for putting Rotator together.


I gotta second the thanks for getting this script working. It is so much better than hacking up the WP files. Just a simple edit in CSS and wham, rotating headers. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
Hey – no problem. I didn’t have to write any code, so I was pretty happy about it, too! A google search turned up the A List Apart article, which pointed me to the Automatic Labs page on the script. Works like a charm.
I’ve noticed old browsers may cache the image – since the URL stays the same – so they won’t get the new-image-every-page-view thing, but whatever. If you’re still using a browser that can’t deal with it, at least you still get an image
Check http://www.directkerala.com/dotnetCouple/2005/12/random-image-rotator-with-css-and.html
for ASP.Net implementaition of image rotator
Cheers!
Can you show us what you changed in the CSS file…
I can’t get it to work, does the PHP parse css files for tags?
It’s ok, i’ve managed to get it to work now.
Also written a short ‘how to‘ if anyone else is interested….
[...] Thanks to D’Arcy Norman, from whom I got the idea. // Used for showing and hiding user information in the comment form function ShowUtils() { document.getElementById(”authorinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(”showinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(”hideinfo”).style.display = “”; } function HideUtils() { document.getElementById(”authorinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(”showinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(”hideinfo”).style.display = “none”; } [...]