Daily changing startup(index)page

[R2D2]

I have a site consisting of a few hundred html pages and I would like to rotate them so that a different one shows every day when somebody types in the url, something I believe is important for returning surfers. I wold like to program it in a simple way so I could say; on this day the "index page" will be aaa.html, on this day; bbb.html etc. What would be the best solution for this?

[brian.mark]

You could do this easily enough with php and pulling the right page for the day. Or, look into scheduled includes.

IIS: Scheduled Includes

Apache: Couldn't locate it, but I'm sure I've done it in the past.

Brian.

[R2D2]

Thanks for the info and link.

Do I understand it correctly that these are all server sided solutins, i.e. the server picks a page and designates it index.html for the day in a manner of speaking?

Is IIS, that looks like the most simple solutin, a part of the FrontPage package (FrontPage bot) or can it be purchased/used independantly?

Does the same apply as in coding by hand vs. WYSIWYG, in the sense that I might be better equipped to deal with glitches and bugs if I use apache or php rather than IIS?

[brian.mark]

We have a "Today Only" sale that just has items numbered 1 through 31. Depending on the day of the month, it just uses an include to call the correct file. I've done that in Perl, but it'd be easy enough to do with PHP, ASP, or any other scripting language.

The FrontPage extension is one way to handle it. Scripting is the other (the extension just handles the scripting for you.)

You could probably even modify a randomizer script to grab the file you want. There are plenty of those available for free if you do a search. It'd be different every time someone went to the site then.

Quite a bit will depend on what type of server you're hosted on and if you know any scripting languages enough to make it work.

Brian.

[R2D2]

Thanks Brian. I worry that having a random page at every loading would be to mutch. I fear users would start hitting the reaload button, trying to see if they will get the same page twice, and crash the server and/or get bored and move on. One page a day would even it out and be more economical content wise. Or I dunno, that´s for later. Now I´ll have to start digging around for scripting and IIS tutorials.