Let's start ... by steps.
1) Your main index file is called "index.php" (not index.html).
2) You create a file that has your quotes ... each quote is on a line by itself.
You can use notepad or we all prefer Notepad++ (google it). Notepad++ is great for coding PHP because it highlights code. And it's great for basic text files too.
3) Save your quote list (file) as anything you want, in the same directory as your "index.php" file. I used the name "ponder.dat" ... I just made up .dat you can use .txt, .dat, .ftw ... whatever you want.
4) the same as your step 4 ... which is all correct.
Any file you have with a .php extension will be processed as PHP. The server will process the scripting before it sends it to the user's browser. So, if your main page is called "index.php", the server does all of the PHP scripting inside of your file (mixed with HTML) and serves it to the browser. The user only sees the resulting HTML ... they don't see the PHP scripting.
Here's an example of a typical "index.php" file ...
PHP Code:
<html>
<head>
<title>my page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my page ... blah blah blah
<br />
<br />
Here is the quote of the day ... <br />
<div>
<?php include("Myquote.php");?>
</div>
</body>
</html>
When the server hits the include part, it will stick the output of that script in that exact spot on your web page.
Here is "Myquote.php" ... and your quote file is called "quote.txt" ...
PHP Code:
<?php
$quote = file("quote.txt");
shuffle($quote);
$string = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), "", $quote[0]);
$quo = str_replace("\"", """, $string);
echo $quo;
?>
You can use a test script called "test.php" instead of "index.php" if you wish .. just for testing.
Let me know if you can get it to work (give me the URL to it).
Then we can expand to include an image (photo).