Can PHP open a link without the user seeing anything?

[Snot]

I have hardware setup to preform an action on camera when i enter a url into the address bar. Pretty much you will be able to feed tarantulas.  I'd like to setup a button that my user can click that will active the url without being moved off of the current page.

 

I can't figure out how to stop the browser from following the link to a blank page. It messes the whole thing up because the feeder only runs for a second and if you get sent to the blank page and have to navigate back the the live video feed page you could miss the feeding.

 

Thanks for the help

[cssfreakie]

All i can think of is AJAX,

 

I just learned it tonight maybe have a look at jquery ajax and a tutorial i found: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/ajax-jquery

 

Could be what our looking for.

So in a nutshell, ajax allows you to do stuff withoutleaving the page

[jay7981]

create a function that does what you want and make the button call that function with onclick just make the anchor # and the target _blank

 

ex:

function .......code here

$feed = function();
<a href="#" onclick="$function" target="_blank">Feed Em!</a>

 

syntaxing for this example may be off ... im giving you and idea not the code as i am really tired and have 10000000s of lines of code in my head at the moment.

[Snot]

Nice. Thanks for the help guys. This will defo give me a place to start.

 

Cheers