Currency Update (Automatic)

[p1drobert]

Do the currencies your site deals with actually change that frequently with a variance that's so drastic it requires real-time updating? Most of the time it's pretty safe to update it once a week manually, according to markets and your own needs.


And ... a hosting company that wants to charge $55 to set up a cron job ... is ripping you off. There are many hosting companies out there that let you do that yourself from within your hosting control panel for no extra charge. The Certified Hosts list at the top of this page shows a few such companies. If you are considering one of them, be sure to ask them about your specific question when doing your research before signing up.

Hi Drbyte.

Normally once a week would be ok, but the world is in panic mode at the moment. The Australian dollar has dropped from 85c US to around 60c in the past month and its jumping all over the place. I can manually do it once a day, but the weekends I'm away from the office.

My host, is fairly cheap and reliable. Despite them trying to gouge me this time I'm pretty pleased with them. But having briefly researched cron jobs before hand it didn't seem right to charge $55 for what seems to be a simple matter.

[yellow1912]

Normally you should have some kind of access to server, such as cpanel, it should allow you to set up cron yourself.

Otherwise, there are websites out there offer free cronjobs, that can be a temporary solution before you find a better solution.

55usd is certainly a rip-off, maybe they just dodnt want to do it, so they just throw in a high price? :)

[kuroi]

You could add "pseudo-cron" to your site. Though my recommendation would also be to switch to a host who lets yor properly control your environment.

[p1drobert]

Thanks Kuroi, and Drbyte.

I checked with my hosting company and they definitely don't allow me to set my own cron jobs. I checked my console and theres no provision for it.

My hosting company charges about $65 a year for hosting which is pretty good. I think I'd be worse of financially switching hosts. It would make more sense to pay the $55 and forget about it.

However I've had a look at the free cron jobs sites, and a quick look at psuedo-cron. The free cron jobs sites look pretty shifty, so I might give psuedo-cron ago. That looks very interesting, and would probably work best. I could set it up to run every time someone landed on my index page. I'll give it a try once I research it properly.

[Delights]

I get the following error when i try and run the file manually. Anyone know why i might get this error.

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/delights/public_html/store/currency_update.php on line 63
preg_match('/(.+),(\w{3}),([0-9.]+),([0-9.]+)/i', implode('', $page), $match); if (sizeof($match) > 0) { return $match[3]; } else { return false; } } function quote_xe_currency($to, $from = DEFAULT_CURRENCY) { $page = file('http://www.xe.net/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1&From=' . $from . '&To=' . $to); $match = array(); preg_match('/[0-9.]+\s*' . $from . '\s*=\s*([0-9.]+)\s*' . $to . '/', implode('', $page), $match); if (sizeof($match) > 0) { return $match[1]; } else { return false; } } ?>h[3]; } else { return false; } } // // Function for currency lookup at XE // function quote_xe_currency($to, $from = DEFAULT_CURRENCY) { $page = file('http://www.xe.net/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1&From=' . $from . '&To=' . $to); $match = array(); preg_match('/[0-9.]+\s*' . $from . '\s*=\s*([0-9.]+)\s*' . $to . '/', implode('', $page), $match); if (sizeof($match) > 0) { return $match[1]; } else { return false; } } ?>

[Delights]

I get the following error when i try and run the file manually. Anyone know why i might get this error.

It seems it was a bad install, i re-loaded the file and it is working now.

[Delights]

The file runs and all that, but it is still saying last update was a day ago, it should be saying today.