Cron job or php function?
 

How do you make a site update it's self on a time basis, is it done through cron jobs or is there a php function or something else like that? For example: an online game like starkingdoms or one of those others. How do they have it set so that the players get money or whatnot at a certian time intervul. How do you do this?

I'd suspect a cron job would be the easiest way.

As in anything, there is more than one way to do it. =)

I've never really looked into cron jobs... would you just tell it to open or run a certian page every 30 min or so and that's how it's done???

What, exactly, are you trying to do? More detail would be helpful.

It is possible (and easy) to schedule a cron job to hit a certain webpage using wget or curl, but is that really the best way to do it? If you are trying to update something on the server, it would be a better idea to run the job via a mechanism that doesn't require the web server in the middle. If PHP is your favored language, it is possible to run PHP from the command line. Start the script out with the following shebang line:

"#!/usr/bin/php -q"

and then execute it from the command line like any other shell script. You can then schedule that job via cron, if you like. I hope this helped to answer your question.