Cron jobs are extremely helpful; I used to run an online pet sim and I used cron jobs to automatically change each pet's age (one day older at midnight) and choose the winners of the daily "pet shows" (they all ran at the same time, but it only required one cron job), among other things.
If you don't have cron jobs at your disposal, there's a script called "PseudoCron" that works as an alternative.
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