FREEBS - Free Book Store Release

Thumbnails are doable I believe, but a query change. Not a big deal.

We don't currently store a description and I'm not sure there is one.

I like the rss idea. Top picks is just a random select. It's not really the top picks. That's why I called it "our picks". But this could be done on any php page with a small snippet of code. A hack for freebs, imagin that! RSS might allow someone to leech your content and use their own buy button.

I dunno if there is an API for the other customers did this and that stuff that you see when you go to an amazon page to get that info. To create our own would involve creating some kinda click counter.

Thanks for the ideas.

 

Their are no syndication links, I just thought it would be good to be able to place a dictonary like that on our sites for those who just want to add content.
It's similar to Freebs but looks like it would add thousands more pages.

Strange though that MSN report 10000 links but using the DP back link monitoring tool there are zero links according to Google ....... their are 233000 pages though.

 

Excellent. I imagine this would improve conversions for visitors browsing the store (versus folks who follow a SERP directly to a book title).

I was envisioning something similar to the RSS feeds produced by Wordpress for the latest blog entries. It lists a link to the base page (a specific book page in this case), the title (book title) and a short description (book description as requested). Since the links go directly to your store's book detail page, I don't see how the RSS is going to allow anyone to leech your content (especially if you don't advertise a link to the RSS feed).

Looking at Amazon briefly ... the description I was referring to might be called "Editorial Reviews". It's not clear if this field is available for every book.

If there isn't a description field available, then the RSS feed might just list the link, title and author...

 

I see what ya mean. I'll consider it, but no promises. I have a full plate and nothing is getting done right now, so I don't want to back slide more.

 

I've added images to mine http://knitting-books.ijoe.net/.
I just pulled the amazon image urls from the data base query as well then resized them with the html... not the best way, but it does the job

 

JoeO, that's pretty much what I was envisioning. Are the images returned by the db query very large or are they not consistently sized? I'm wondering what it might look like if you used the unaltered image. BTW, can you share the changes you made to the script to effect the image display?

 

The DB stores links to the small images provided by amason. This is not a difficult mod.

nudge him to post the "hack". I'll probably add it in a future release if it catches on.

 

hehe not much of a hack, but here you go:

Grab the image form the initial query:

$picks = mysql_query("SELECT asin,name,url,image FROM ". TABLE_PREFIX ."items WHERE 1 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5 ");

PHP:

And then the output:

while( $data = mysql_fetch_Array($result) )
		{
			
			$as_of_time = date( "F dS, Y h:i:s A" ,$data[date]);
			$all_books .= '<table cellpadding=4 cellspacing=4 class="bbord"><tr><td width=85 align=center><a href="isbn' . $data[asin] . '.html">' . '<img src="' . $data[image] . '" border=0 height=80></a></td><td width=470>';
			if( $SEO_MODE )
			{
				$all_books .= '<a href="isbn' . $data[asin] . '.html"><b>' . $data[name] . '</b></a>';
			}
			else
			{
				$all_books .= '<a href="book.php?isbn=' . $data[asin] . '.html">' . $data[name] . '</a>';
			}
			if ($data[author]!="") $all_books .=  '<br /><i>By ' . $data[author]. '</i>';
			$all_books .= 
			'<br />Our Price: <b>' . $data[ourp] . '</b>' . 
			'<br /> ' . $data[avail] . 
			'<br />As of: ' .  $as_of_time . '</td></tr></table><br /><br />';
						
		}						

PHP:

 

WTG Joe, thanks man!

 

No problem, but no thanks necessary. Its the very least I can do compared to what you have provided

 

Thanks JoeO.

 

Good news, of the 4700 books/pages that show up doing a google site search approx 700 are now included in the coop back link tracker tool since yesterday.

This is the first time any of the amazon pages have shown up their, anyone else seeing new pages using this tool.

 

Nope never, but it sounds like something to try. Thanks

 

Coop Backlink tracker? Do you mean the Digital Point Back Link tracker?

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

 

Thats the one

 

Attention FREEBS users!

If you are using a version of FREEBS prior to 1.12, we need you to perform an update to the file AmazonSearch.php in the includes folder.

Please open this file in an editor and perform the following change.

Locate...

define('WSDL_FILE',   'http://soap.amazon.com/schemas2/AmazonWebServices.wsdl');

PHP:

Replace with...

define('WSDL_FILE',   'http://soap.amazon.com/schemas3/AmazonWebServices.wsdl');

PHP:

This is an important change that will insure you are getting the most current and complete book information from amazon.

Thanks for using FREEBS - Free Amazon Book Store.

 

I seem to have lost the traffic I was getting from Yahoo previously. Has anyone noticed a sharp decline in traffic to FREEBS pages? Was most likely the honeymoon period, and now the pages have dropped off the SERPS.

 

This may have been answered here previously, if so, i apologize. Is it possible to use this for only one category of products from amazon?

 

This is not good, Google took away all my amazon pages.....back to 380 pages again.
Anyone else notice this happening to them.

Good question Wendy, I guess it would only involve changing one peice of code, from books to whatever.

 

I've not had any negative movement on either Yahoo or Google. On the plus side, I've had about a 33% pickup in coop weight which I'm thinking must be attributable to the bookshop.

On another note, does anyone have Adsense tweaking ideas for making the ads more relevant to the book subjects or titles. Right now most of the ads I get are geared toward my overall site theme even if the particular book(s) isn't related. I would be cool if someone searching for a book also got Adsense ads that were targeted to their search topic.