Detect new visitor

1

Hello everyone,

Just wondering how I should go about changing some a paragraph of text from ‘hello new user’ to ‘hello n00b’ if the user hasnt been to my site before.

so far I’ve been fooling around with this JS:


function bakeCookie(name,value,days) {
    if (days) {
        var date = new Date();
        date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));
        var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString();
    }
    else var expires = "";
    document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/";
}

function salivateAfterCookie(name) {
    var nameEQ = name + "=";
    var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
    for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
        var c = ca*;
        while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
        if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
    }
    return null;
}

function eatCookie(name) {
    bakeCookie(name,"",-1);
}

window.onload = function() {
    blah = document.getElementById('begin');
    if(salivateAfterCookie('visitor') == 'old') {    
        document.write('hello again')
    } else {
        document.write('hello n00b')    
    }
    bakeCookie('visitor', 'old', 999)
}

but, when i visit the page, only the ‘hello again’/‘hello n00b’ text displays, and the rest of the site doesnt.
also, how can i get it to write into one specific div?

or shoudl i do all this in .php?

thanks