Hi there Everyone! There are many sites, which have things like "today is XXX's birthday", or "today happened in history: XXX".

If we presume that this is done by php and MySQL, I was wondering where do they get the mysql database files from. Is there a site where these sort of database file can be downloaded? How should I search for it/them?

Thank you in advance

MySQL itself must be provided by your host. What you should look for is rather scripts that enter this kind of data in the database and and provide a way to display it on your page. Maybe you can't find exactly what you want, but maybe something that you could make minor changes to.

I saw at least one birthday script here, I don't know if it's any good and you would have to find and enter a list of birthdays yourself.
http://www.hotscripts.com/category/php/scr...rams/date-time/

My baaad... I was not understandable, sorry! I did not mean the scripts nor the mysql queries.

I ment the database file itself. The file which contains data. Table or whatever. Because I do not know who was born, when, so I would need a table where one column displays the date of birth and the other the name of the famous person. And the rows contain the persons.
I mean is there such a place on the net where I can find data tables about famous dates, birthdays or something like that.

You could build one yourself from public sources, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1

Yes, you are right. But I hoped that somebody already did it before me and shared it on the internet.

Maybe they did but you'd have to search for it. Would depend on what kind of people you want to be included also.

Hi Pandy! It does not really matter! I was just wondering which keywords should I use in google search...

How about "celebrity birthdays"?

Frederiek. I need tables... not sites! If I look for the wrods you mentioned I will get plenty of sites which are _using_ the tables I am looking for....and _sharing_ them.

I was hoping that there is a site which shares these tables...

Anyway, thank you for the ideas!

Try searching for spreadsheets, excel or csv files.

But as long as you have some kind of list of names/birthdates you should be able to enter them in a DB relatively easily (after some cleaning up with a text editor). For example, you might use the PHP explode() function to make an array of them, then loop through that array while running an INSERT query in each loop.

Or use a ready-made birthday script that is bound to have a form for the purpose.

Or, from those sites, you could copy the data in the tables and recreate your own DB with it (if you know how), as Christian more or less already suggested. That way, you can choose any people you specifically want.

Uh, no. The "form" will be for manually entering the information -- the whole point is that the OP wants to find a ready-made collection of data -- it is then a trivial _programming_ job to convert this into the contents of a database, in whatever format you want. Equally, generating the particular html snippets you need is another trivial _programming_ job. All these suggestions of "modern computing" (the view that a computer enables you to do something by hand, just more neatly) are irrelevant as far as I can see.

Apart from the extremely low probability of finding a spreadsheet lying around on the web, it's the wrong answer anyway. Ideally XML is the way to represent *structured data* of this type.

To OP:

Sorry, I don't have any precise suggestions. But (it seems to me) just about all the answers you have received have been addressing the wrong issues.

One issue is that if you find an (advert-laden) site showing lots of birthdays (e.g. with the search Frederiek suggested (How about "celebrity birthdays"?), you can be sure that the "owners" of the information claim they "own" it. You need to make sure you are looking for collections made by people who like you regard a list of birthdays as just something everyone is reasonably entitled to know (as they are, of course). Look on Wikipedia -- I couldn't find birthday lists as such, but I think there are "February birthdays". You really need to do some research to find other people who want the same sort of information, and amazingly you will no doubt find them (eventually; or when the group of people finally forms). You might even end up contributing something by putting together a mechanism for collecting birthdays.

I think it is very frustrating that it can still be very hard sometimes to find obvious information, which will all eventually become everyone's. But look at the speed at which this has happened already for "standard encyclopedic articles" (Wikipedia) or maps (openstreetmap.org), out-of-copyright music scores (imslp.org), and so on. Given that the widespread availability of printed matter took hundreds of years from Gutenberg's introduction of movable type from China, we ought to be patient after only 15.

HTH

PS: You could also poke around Wikimedia and Creative Commons...

Which is helpful if you aren't able to do do it yourself.

No it isn't. If you aren't capable of doing trivial programming tasks, it would be vastly more efficient to pay someone who is. You keep trying to solve the wrong problem.

Thank you Everyone for the answers. Actually (as I wrote previously) I was hoping to find a site where these lists/tables are shared. Eventually a wast amount of sites (besides wikipedia, I've seen them on many even very small, private or hobby webpages) are using these tables. I found them on very basic webpages where it was clear for me that the owner of the webpage had no clue about html/css/php programming..so he must have gotten even the php scripts from someone.
Anyway... the point is that I've seen these scripts on many-many different type of sites, I thought that they surely did not make their own tables one by one, they must have gotten these tables from somewhere.... And as Brian mentioned these are not confidential data, I hoped that there is a site which makes these tables available for anyone who wants to use them...

As I did not find any page, probably the solution lies in Brian's suggestion to contact these sites/groups/persons and maybe somehow I can get it from them..

Once more...thank you for the suggestions and have a nice weekend all!

if someone can help me do this thing i'l be very appreciated

man i'm working all day and i have i just can't get it

please help

Maybe you could ask a more specific question and preferably start a new thread about it. Surely you don't want us to write the whole page for you?