WebDev: Mixing PHP, JScript and Flash <Rave>

Decided to get back into a little programming this weekend, just to keep my coding skills from going rusty.

I found a neat little Flash scrolling text banner generator (on another Blog*Spot page) from here. Great for displaying static messages, but what about something dynamic - what about my hobby server's uptime?

I wrote a little PHP script, called by the system crontab every 10 minutes, to create an external .js file that uses document.write to load the .swf file with params, all of which is executed when this page is loaded.

Initial results worked really well, but of course the plain old uptime output from my hobby server was a little boring, so I found and used a combination of nifty PHP scripts to find and parse the system uptime into another format. Then I added the ability to record the highest uptime value and report back the current and highest uptimes so far.

The end result may not be that much to most people, but very satisfying for me all the same. You can see the banner over on the right side-bar, after the Archives section.


Update 2006-01/31: looks like someone was interested enough to tag this post on blinkbits.com.