I've looked over a few of my accounts recently and I have around $84 in one, $55 in another and $92 in another. That's $228 in total, over £100! Can I get this money? No, because the payout threshold is $100 on all of them.nnI can understand why the thresholds are there, but if Amazon, possibily one of the biggest networks when it comes to affiliate numbers (I could be wrong there, just guessing as it's the longest affiliate scheme running that I know of) can make a payout via bank for a threshold of £10, why can these other places not make their payouts sooner?nnOkay two reasons. The first is paperwork, accounts and administration. Understandable. The second option? So they can make the interest on your money. It's almost like having a bank account but not being allowed access to it.

This morning I had a bit of a scare. An email from Nominet (the UK domain registry) saying one of my domain names had expired and not been renewed. The domain name in question was my business domain! All my emails, my website, everything I do is connected to that.

First things first, I checked my folder in Outlook that holds all the renewal receipts and found this had been renewed over two weeks ago. Easily within enough time. So I logged in my 123-Reg account and couldn't see it in the list to renew. After having to faff around, updating my email to gain access to the support area I finally got an email sent to them requesting them to investigate, however this didn't put me in a good mood for the morning, so after not hearing from them by lunchtime I phoned them.

35 minutes and £3.50 in phone charges later, I was told it was Nominet's fault (likely story) and that I had to fill out an e-form for each domain that hadn't been renewed. Despite already paying for these domains they couldn't just go and tell Nominet they'd been renewed. So I've lost my concentration for the morning and lost at least an hour of my time trying to sort their mess out.

Suffice to say I'll be moving away from 123-reg this week. It's not the first problem I've had with them within the past year. Last year in July I hit my affiliate payout threshold with them however no cheque every arrived. After 3 months I contacted them, which took about 4 attempts to get a response which then said their threshold was £50 and not £25. Typically, they'd upped the threshold after I'd passed it and during me waiting for a cheque. Several further emails and I finally got someone to sort a cheque out for me.

Arrays are such a useful part of PHP. It's a way to store multiple pieces of information in one variable, and they can be very powerful and timesaving when used in the right way.

There are a couple of ways to create an array. The first is writing the whole array out in one go eg.

Array Code

1. $testarr = array("Bob", "Sally", "John", "Pete", "David", "Jane");

This is fine if you can create the array with one line, however as your PHP progresses you'll find you use an array to capture data from say a form submission. So an efficient way of doing this, and another way which you can create an array, looping or otherwise, is

Array Code

1. $testarr = array();
2. $testarr[] = "Bob";
3. $testarr[] = "Sally";
4. $testarr[] = "John";
5. $testarr[] = "Pete";
6. $testarr[] = "David";
7. $testarr[] = "Jane";

Note the first line initialises the array. This is for security to ensure that nothing has been passed into the array eg. via the URL, that we don't want in there.

With this array you can use it in a variety of functions and uses. For a full list of the functions available read the Arrays page on PHP.net. Examples of usage are

• Re-sort the list and display in alphabetical order.
• Compare a variable to the array to see if the variable exists within the array.

To simply list the content of an array you can either do the quick and easy method using print_r()

Array Code

1. print_r($testarr);

Or you could do it a little neater using the foreach loop.

Foreach Loop Code

1. foreach ($testarr AS $key => $value) :
2. echo "Item ".$key.": ".$value;
3. endforeach;

Yes, we've topped over 1000 visitors a day for 3 days out of the last week, dropping to just over 800 on the weekends. What's the reason for this? Couldn't tell you to be honest! We're getting around 1000 visitors a month via Everyclick.com, which is actually a search engine that gives to charity, so that's pretty cool!nnThe stats show us that in January and February we topped just over 7000 visitors / 6000 uniques each month. Then in March something changed as that shot up to 10,000 uniques. Now we're on 20,000. Within less than 6 months the visitors have tripled, with no changes by me as I've just been too busy! I have been working on new pages for the shopping cart but these have also been neglected in recent months.nnSeeing these visitor figures along with the 100% increase in AdSense (which I don't want to solely rely on!!) has reminded me to get my backside into gear and get the shopping cart finished off. The bulk of it is there for the frontend however I keep thinking about what else I could add in and the job is never finished. So whilst work is nice and quiet I intend to get this finished. I could probably do it within a day or two if I put my mind to it (and turned Wimbledon off!).nnThere's nothing like a big hike in visitors to motivate you nn(And yes, this is the site in my Alexa Experiment – averaging 900 visitors per day for the past week and the Alexa rank is showing 781,906 for the past week average. )

I've seen various arguments for and against the currency of pricing to be used on a website selling products. Some argue that you should target your primary audience, some say you should stick to US Dollars. I can understand both sides of the argument and so on our product selling site I've opted to display the products in Pound Sterling, as the domain is a UK domain and a large percentage of the visitors are from the UK. However I've also opted to use the Dynamic Currency Coverter to display US Dollars in brackets after the price. This way I'm covering both my main audience and the US Dollars idea.nnI think it makes more sense for a UK site (and by this I mean it has a UK domain so is almost definitely a UK site) to be displaying prices in its own currency. However, of course this can alienate foreign visitors, and considering the US Dollar is probably the best known currency, I do still agree that it's worthwhile to have.nnMy reasoning for using the Dynamic converter is due to the constant change in the exchange rate (currently $2 to £1 I think). This way I don't have to worry about updating the conversion rate and can leave the script to deal with this by itself. I could offer other currencies too using the converter but is that a little overkill? Looking at the stats (that are not accurate when 'ntlworld.com', and 'AOL.com' are classed as the USA despite the first being a UK company and the second having plenty of people from all over the world), I can see that taking the USA and Great Britain out, the next highest is classed as Europe at around 6% of total pageviews (I don't get actual visitors on the country breakdown). Considering the rest of the countries are even less than this, I would imagine that offering further price conversions would simply be too much.nnAny other currency I should think about?