MyBannerExchange
Installation Instructions

The first thing you'll need to do is configure your MySQL settings. Open config.php in Notepad or another text editor. The first 4 variables ($sqlhost, $sqllogin, $sqlpass, $sqldb) need to be configured with your MySQL settings. These settings are your MySQL Hostname, Username, Password, and Database Name. The other variable, $table, is the table name to be created, and can be left as it is unless you really need to change it.

$bx_url must be set to the FULL URL that points to MyBannerExchange. It must end with a trailing slash! It should point to a directory, NOT a file.
$bx_title should be a one-word title of your existing website that MyBannerExchange will be running with. This appears in the title bar of each page along with the individual title of that page. For example, on my copy of the script, $bx_title = "NukedWeb" and the signup page shows "NukedWeb: Create Your Account" in the titlebar.
$hours_must_be_active represents the number of hours an account is inactive before it's removed from the banner cycle. This feature safeguards against people that remove the code from their site, or never put the code in at all. If that paerson does not send a hit from the banner on their site within xx hours, their banner is not shown on any other site. Banners will continue being shown on their site, and when they finally do send a hit, it'll automatically be reinstated into the system. This feature also prevents dead-beat no-traffic websites from sucking up hits from high-trafic sites. :) Note: You can set a specific account, most likely your own, to be exempt from this time interval. This can be done through the admin page.
$adminpass is the password for the administration area. Change this now!! :)

The other variables....
The head and foot files are files containing HTML that appears at the top and bottom of your website. You can use the head.php and foot.php that came with the script, or point the script to the location of the existing files. The other variables in this section should need no detailed explanation. They control the design of the signup and login pages, as well as button texts, page titles, etc.

Save config.php and upload it to your website. Also upload create_table.php to the same place. Now access your website through your browser, and access /create_table.php. You'll be prompted with further instructions from there.

Now, for the categories. The categories are kept in categories.txt. They're formatted to include subcategories too. Notice subcategories are separated by a space, dash, space. If you add/edit categories, it's very important that you format it this way, because the script sometimes parses category names using the " - ". Review the categories and add/edit/remove them. It's best that you do this now! If you remove a category later that someone has listed themselves under, they may not ever show up in the banner cycle.

An explanation to targeted banners...
I want to take a minute or two to explain to you how this works. When a person signs up using a specific category, by default they'll have banners of that same category on their site. Now obviously, when you first get your service going, each person may be the only one in their subcategory, or even the only one in their main category. The script compensates for this. The script first checks to see if there's another site in that category. If there is, it displays it. If not, it then checks to see if there's another site in that main category. If not, it tries a third time by checking the entire database for another banner to display, regardless of category. If THAT fails, that means you only have one account in your database that's considered "active". You should at least add your own banner by creating your own account, and then set it for "exempt" on the admin page. :)

Now everything's ready! Upload all the files, including files you've just made changes to, to the folder on your website where MyBannerExhcange will be running from. Access create.php through your web browser and create your own account. Remember to go to the admin area afterwards and make your account exempt from the time interval.

To access the admin page, access admin.php from your browser. From here you can list/edit/remove users, and add/delete exempt status. Enter the password you chose when configuring the config file.