Graphical Countdown tickers...

[Daffodil]

Hi everyone! This place is so nice I decided to settle in LOL. I spent the day searching for scripts and stuff to achieve my objective but I must say I'm not sure I even got figured out what i need!

I participate in a very nice community in the infertility and surrogacy world. There are some places where we can get tickers (ex: www.lilypie.com, tickercentral.com) but they don't always meet our needs graphically or the type of countdown or count up we seek.

I'm pretty good with graphics (photoshop, gif animator, 3Dmax) and manage with Dreamweaver and Fireworks. However I'm a begginner in Html and don't know much about php or scripting.

We want to have the means to generate our own tickers. I wanted to build a few pages site to linked to from our forum where people would create their tickers and where these would be hosted.

Here are the common tickers we use:

TTC (trying to conceive): Ticker shows cycle day; caption says: x days until O days (calculated from the cycle lenght input the person put in or fix date option)
2ww(2 weeks wait before beta): Ticker mark cycle day; caption says:x days since TF (or O) x more days until betaBJC (boobie juice crew) Graphic 1 shows a bottle with the caption written inside, Graphic 2 shows a progress bar; caption says:Today I got x oz! Thats a total of x oz so far! (calculated by adding the daily input, allowing skipping days and retroactive corrections of the data base past entries)
BF BreastFeeding : Been Breastfeeding for x months x days!
EDD (expected due date): Ticker shows where today is from day 1 and caption says Baby due in x days!
Age: Ticker mark month on timeline; caption says:My surrobabe is x months and x weeks
Generic: Ticker mark day to event on timeline; caption says: x days until whatever person inputs as caption


I need you guys to tell me what parts of script or code I need to look for to make that ticker generator or even better if you know of an Open Sourse one or even one that could be bought but not to expensive...

That would be awsome! Thanks already!

[djr33]

Hmmm... it's certainly possible.

You should definitely look into PHP... that's how you'd do all of this.

The base for it would be storing information in a database and using that, along with current server time, to generate information. You could have a hits counter store hits in the database, or a countdown get the time its counting to, minus the current time, and that's the time left, etc. etc.
The math might be a bit complex for some of this, but probably not too bad.

Once you have the php generating a result, like "005586 hits", or something, you can have it display that in many ways.
You could have it simply display as text, maybe formatted a bit. Or you could have the php know that if there is a "1" in the output, to display "1.jpg" at that point, which is an image you made in photoshop, so you've got a row of images making up a counter.
The best way, however, would be to actually generate an image.
This gets into pretty advanced coding, and you would use php's GD library, which actually allows you to create dynamic (and changing) images.
You can add text, draw shapes, and even do insanely advanced things like alpha channels and make selections, all through text commands. Kinda crazy.
I'm not sure how much you want to get into that, but it's very useful if you have the time and/or interest.


Note: you mentioned a progress bar... that could be fairly complex. If you need it to move, that's quite complex. If not, not terribly hard.

[Daffodil]

Thanks for your thoughful reply!

I have some time (though I am scared that this will prove a monumental time consuming task!!! I just think that 6 years ago, I spent 50 hours in one week searching the web to learn the ABC of websites because I wanted to desing one- did not know anything about it, nor what was a domain, an IP address, hosting services vs IPs providers, differance between a search engine and a directory meta tags etc,, than learning Dreamweaver etc - so im wondering how much time will it take to learn a programation language?!! bare with me the only 2 times I programmed was 20 years ago in Basic in High school and a very complex macro to transform AS400 data to formatted text in visual basic 14 years ago so I have no idea how to go about these new things!)

My hosting service offers MySQL will I need to learn what that is and what it does as well?

Is there any good tutorial out there that would give me a macroscopic view of these things before getting into details so I could figure out what things are and what they do, in terms of php, javascript, cgi bin, MySQL? And tutorials to learn thoese I need to?

I am pretty good in terms of sketching an organigram of interactions (forms process output) as I was able to design a data base in Access but I'm terrible at spelling out the queries (formulas never work :p )

Thanks again!

[djr33]

MySQL is a database language that you can access via PHP.

PHP outputs text that is sent to the user. It's "server side" as it works on the server.

Javascript is client side. It can have interaction with the user, and is included in the text sent to the user.

You shouldn't need CGI for this.


Here's somethign that might help you:
http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/

[Daffodil]

:D http://aas.commealaplage.com/smileys/coeur.gif

Ty!

[missang24]

Check out www.tickerscript.net
They are the only website on the web that offers a Graphical Countdown Ticker Script.
Its cheap too, and is very nicely designed.

[missang24]

Actually I found this other Ticker Script: http://www.mytickerscript.com
This one is actually a clone of Lilypie.com and has more features than it actually! It even has a Weight Loss Ticker with login functions so that the user doesn't have to keep creating more tickers to update their stats!

And it has an ADMIN panel to upload new ticker graphics, change the template, etc.

http://www.mytickerscript.com

Hope this helps again!