"Now on Air" message...

[petedaines]

Hi,
My boss at the radio station has asked me to investigate to see if I can put a "Now on Air" feature on the site, to show which presenter is currently on air.
The web site hosting is located at Radio St Austell Bay - it is all CSS & HTML, but I could convert it to PHP if that is the only way.

If anyone has any ideas, it would be appreciated!!! I have scoured the internet but can't find anything that would work... but most stations have a feature like that!

Thanks!

Peter

[Site]

Hi,
Would you have a schedule that you would like to make it auto list for that time?

Or ping on change over from a program on the computer streaming?

[Eidolon]

I guess you could store the 'whose on air' info via a database table. The table could include a 'start time' column, along with a column defining whether it's a weekday or specific day (as presumably normal weekdays are the same). The table could also contain a column defining which file to load.

Then via PHP you could get the date & time, using the day (ie. Monday etc.) you could query along the lines for where CURRENT DATE = "Weekday" or equals "Monday" (though would need adapting to cope with weekends). It could additionally have a query where CURRENT TIME is greater than the start time (column). The query would have a limit of 1, so that only one record loads via an include.

The only complication would be where the presenter goes over midnight, in which instant two rows would probably be needed with one set to 00:00 to prevent no record/file from showing.

[petedaines]

I guess you could store the 'whose on air' info via a database table. The table could include a 'start time' column, along with a column defining whether it's a weekday or specific day (as presumably normal weekdays are the same). The table could also contain a column defining which file to load.

Then via PHP you could get the date & time, using the day (ie. Monday etc.) you could query along the lines for where CURRENT DATE = "Weekday" or equals "Monday" (though would need adapting to cope with weekends). It could additionally have a query where CURRENT TIME is greater than the start time (column). The query would have a limit of 1, so that only one record loads via an include.

The only complication would be where the presenter goes over midnight, in which instant two rows would probably be needed with one set to 00:00 to prevent no record/file from showing.

Thanks both for your replies!
The problem I will have is that the radio station website hosting is hosted on a server with different company (uk2 i think), as it was done before I came in. I only have FTP access to the site, and cannot do MySQL with it - but is it possible to do the database thing on my Dedicated Server with eukhost and remotely access it?

Also I am not fluent with PHP... so if I do that I will probably be posting for help on here!!!! MySQL is fine, as I use PHPmyadmin which is pretty easy.

Thanks again!!!

Peter

[Site]

Hi,
You could do the MySQL Server on your server with a dynamic php page, and simply iframe it in with no scroll into their current site.



Site

[borninblood]

It is old school - But javascript and arrays would do it.

Basically store the images or text as needed in an array, and javascript check the time and if it falls between starttime and endtime for an elemet of an array, print out the on air thing (or custom graphic/text).

[paul]

Yea for manipulating information javascript and arrays would do the job, you need to initialize the array with pre-defined data which will accomplish the task that you would like to do. Also refer this article, I hope it may help you; earthcode.com/blog/2006/02/javascript_event_broadcasting.html

[WelshTom]

Iframes and Javascript = Evil....

Yes, you should be able to remotely connect to the eUKhost MySQL server.