So you want to display a randomly selected quote on your page, and you want to use PHP to do it; you’ll need PHP support on your server. An easy way to test this is to stick <?php phpinfo(); ?> into a .php file, upload that file to your server, and load it in your browser. If you get a huge table with information about your PHP setup, then you know you have PHP support. If you get a blank page, then you don’t have PHP. :(

Create a file with one quote per line and save it as quotes.txt.

The file in which you want to display your random quote must be a PHP file. Add the following code to it:

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$quotes = file("/the/full/path/to/your/file/quotes.txt");
srand((double)microtime() * 1000000);
$ranNum = rand(0, count($quotes)-1);

In the area where you want your random quote displayed, insert the following:

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echo $quotes[$ranNum];

You don’t have to use this for just random quotes either – maybe you want to display a random image. You might use the following code:

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$images = file("/the/full/path/to/your/file/images.txt");
srand((double)microtime() * 1000000);
$ranNum = rand(0, count($images)-1);
echo '<img src="' . $images[$ranNum] . '" alt="Random image">';

And in this case, your images.txt file wouldn’t contain one random quote per line, but one image name per line:

/images/john.jpg
http://www.example.com/tom.png
me.gif