Rotate by time interval?

OK, I solved this myself. Being a Drupal newbie (Drubie?) I gave up on adapting any of the several available PHP slideshow routines; I just don't do PHP yet. But I found an easier solution using Flash. First I made up a series of banners in the 970x180 format that the Marinelli theme takes. Then I created a slideshow from these banners in Flash, resulting in a banners.swf file. Patching the .swf file into the Marinelli theme turned out to much easier than I thought. I just had to ftp-down, edit, and ftp-back-up two of the theme's files.

(1) In the /sites/themes/marinelli/graphics.css file, at line 20, which begins with "#header " I commented out the rest of the line, which gets rid of the background color (not needed) and the rotate.php procedure, also not needed.

(2) Then in the /sites/themes/marinelli/page.tpl.php file, at line 66, which is directly below the line <div id="header">, I pasted in a standard Flash object code snippet:

 <object><embed src="/sites/all/themes/marinelli/banners.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="970" height="180" name="banners" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</embed> </object>

And that's all.

After playing with that for a while, I switched to the Alagna sub-theme because I like its typography and its rounded corners for blocks. (My wish list for Marinelli is rounded edges all around.) The same modifications as above work for Alagna. Alagna does not have banner rotation out of the box. This Flash patch-in works just fine, nevertheless. I also tweaked the background color a little, adding a gradient. If you want to see the result, go to http://sheilajordan.org.

In principle one should be able to play a YouTube video in the banner, except that the video format is the wrong size and shape. Earlier on in my experiments I established that a Picasa slideshow uploaded to Google web could also be patched into the Marinelli banner, but Picasa slideshows come with big side margins and unwanted dialog buttons. So, creating a .swf file from scratch with the required format was a better solution.