Question

I’m making a “newest users” page.

All users have an timestamp in the column “unixdate”, that it stores when you register. Dont know if this is smart, but I like how effective the UNIX time() is and how simple it is.

Now I am showing the newest users within 24 hours by doing this:

$long = "86400"; // 24 hours in seconds
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE unixdate > time()-$long ORDER BY unixdate DESC";

Is this an good method to show on? And if I would like to show newest within 3 days, would it be * 3?

Thank you

Answer 1

It’s quite all right. A few minor things:

• don’t use SELECT *, only choose the columns that you want
• if you see performance problems, you may want to actually pass time()-$long as a constant (for more efficient query – TIME() gets re-evaluated for every row)
• index on unixdate might be useful
• UNIX time is undefined beyond the year 2038
• the query returns the newest users “in the last 24 hours”, that could be different from “in the last day” (DST), but if you’re aware of this distinction, it’s not a big deal.

.

$yesterday = time() - 86400;  
$query = "SELECT somecolumn1,somecolumn2,othercolumn FROM users
                 WHERE unixdate > $yesterday ORDER BY unixdate DESC";