During the Christmas 2009 season, I will use jSnow 1.1 to decorate byteme.gr with a special type of snowflakes...space invader snowflakes! The code used is very simple and it consists of two parts A) PHP and B) the jSnow implementation. I am using PHP because I want it to (j)snow after 19:00 and until 8:00 in the morning (Greek is set to +2:00 GMT), not all day long :).

So here is the full php code that controls the appearance of the script according to the time and prints out the javascript code:

1. <?php
2. $HOUR = date('G');
3. if ($HOUR>=19 || $HOUR<8) {
4. echo '<script type="text/javascript" src="'.$R.'/js/jsnow.js"></script>';
5. echo '$(function() {';
6. echo '$().jSnow({flakes:20,flakeCode:[$R+"/images/invader_flake1.gif",$R+"/images/invader_flake2.gif"],zIndex:9999});';
7. }
8. />

Wherever you see $R (in PHP or JS) is a variable for the root path of the website. It's a very common shortcut that I use to reference the website's root folder in JavaSCript and PHP.

I hope this short tip and demonstration will help you with jSnow.