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If your site focuses on a specific event such as Christmas or your wedding, you may want to have a count down to let users know how long it will be until the event occurs. We can do this using timestamps and the mktime function.

Let's get going
First we need to set our target date. For our example we will use February 10th, 2007. We would get that with this line:
$target = mktime(0, 0, 0, 2, 10, 2007);

Next we need to get the current date. We can do that with this line:
$today = time ();

We now have to find the difference between them. To do that we simply need to subtract:
$difference = ($target-$today);

Since the timestamp is measured in seconds, we conv...

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Have you ever wanted a simple counter on your website? Here's how to implement one using PHP!

Let's get started:
First off we are going to work main parts of the script, I am going to call it counter.php
<?
// counter.php
/* First we assign a variable name to our 
txt file that holds our number of hits. */
$count_file = ("counter.txt");
/* This next line sets the variable $number_of_hits equal 
to the value inside the counter.txt */
$number_of_hits = file($count_file);
/* Now our next line will increment the number of 
hits in the counter.txt by 1, this will happen 
everytime the page loads. */
$number_of_hits[0]++;
/* Next we need to open the counter.txt file so we ...

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Why?
Why, use PHP? The short answer: it's powerful, it's easy to use, and it's free. Extremely robust and scalable, PHP can be used for the most demanding of applications, and delivers excellent performance even at high loads. Built-in database support means that you can begin creating data-driven applications immediately. Toss in a great manual, a knowledgeable developer community and a really low price (can you spell f-r-e-e?) and you've got the makings of a winner!

What You Need
You need access to a web-host that supports PHP preferably running Apache or you can run it localy on your PC (using wamp), people sometimes use this for testing.

Lets Go!
To tell the server you are using PHP we always use ...