Dear Amazon Associate -
Greetings from the Amazon Associates Team! We have noticed that it’s been over three years since you last referred a unit to Amazon. We are writing to notify you that on July 1, we will be applying a $10 account maintenance fee to your account. Please review this email to learn more on how you can reactivate your account or avoid this fee by making new payment method choices.

So far, there’s been only one purchase through my links earning me a total of—hot damn…a whopping $0.75! That was earned back in 2003 and the only time they fork over the earnings is when the total is at least $10. Looks like I’ll have to say bye-bye to the $0.75 (or will they give me a credit/Gift Certificate towards a future purchase?). Update: I sent an e-mail inquiring about my situation and was able to get my $0.75 deposited to me.

It’s really bizarre even having the 1 referral/purchase considering that what was actually ordered by the person had nothing to do with anything I was reading at the time. They must have gotten side tracked so I ended up earning the referral as a click through and not a direct buy link.

Oh, well—There’s really no chance of any of my links generating a commission before July 1^st so it’s bye-bye associates links. There goes my PHP project of putting together my own script to automate my reading lists. Now I have to re-edit my code again removing the referral links. Sure I can still link to them without the referral code if I wanted to, but I’m sure you have to be an associate in order to log-in to get and use the pictures of the book covers. Now I have to think of another PHP learning project to take up my spare time.

I’ll just have to change the wording in my auctions so that people who decided to bid on multiple auctions of mine and win them must wait for an invoice. The majority of people these days are real good at paying. One person a while ago paid within minutes of the auction close. Didn’t even get the chance the send an invoice.

Anyway, I decided to come up with my own e-mail invoice form for times when the standard invoice would not be feasible. It’s PHP style. I took the standard wording from the invoice sent and used that template to create my own. Sure a e-mail template can be used but I wanted a template that also does the adding of costs for me. Plus, it is a chance to really dive head first into PHP hacking.

To prevent wasted time online and hogging up the phone line trying to test out my coding, I use XAMPP server by Apache Friends. There are 2 versions: lite and full. The full version comes with the following along with other items depending on whether you use Linux, Windows or Solaris SPARC:

• Apache
• PHP and PEAR
• Perl
• MySQL
• ADOdb
• phpMyAdmin
• OpenSSL
• Webalizer

Great for testing out some of your server side scripting or testing out server side software before releasing it live. I even tested out WordPress offline before I tried it out on my DreamHost space.

Everything’s working fine but, I know there is a more efficient way to loop through the section of each “Item #”, “Item Title”, “Qty” and “Price” and create if, else Array statements to clean up some extra line breaks if a person only wins, say, one auction only. Right now there’s “item0” through “item6” for each possible item they win. Each item on it’s own line.

Yesterday I even created a form that creates a “Payment Acknowledgement” page that fills out the bidders ID and total paid.

My “To Do” list for future revisions:

• Create code that combines the “Invoice” and “Payment” forms on one central .php template page. A set of radio buttons will determine which filled out page is the final output.
• Create code that will have the resulting page previewed and create a button script that will automatically e-mail the page to the bidder; instead of my currently having to select all the resulting text and paste it into an blank e-mail.