Freebie 2.0 released

"Freebie" is a simple package that can add thousands of relevant, frequently changing pages to your site with very little effort and almost no maintenance. The pages are Amazon-bookshop pages for book titles relevant to your site (as determined by your search setting).

Version 2.0 is now released (in fact, we're already up to 2.02, with some minor fixes and much-expanded documentation). This new version is utter simplicity to install and use--far easier than the 1.x series.

Among other things new in this upgrade are:

• full internationalization, with titles collected from all six national Amazon divisions (in separate lists) and the ability for your visitors to easily switch from one division to another;
  
• built-in support for the Digitalpoint co-op ad network, with a simple module that can be used as is or modified to suit your taste in ad displays;
  
• spammer throttling, so that email harvesters and like scum who try to take files at denial-of-service rates will be choked back, with parameters of your choice used to control the throttling;
  
• built-in modular support for Google AdSense ad code, with provision for up to 10 different code modules (for different colors, for example);
  
• automatic handling of selecting and displaying a "sample" title display, and of inserting your site name and internal links;
  
• and, as they say, there's more.
  

You can check it out by downloading it from the Freebie home page .

 

Well done Eric! I used the previous version for a bit but decided on Amaxoop in the end. However this is very slow so I will give Freebie 2 a new chance.

 

Please be advised that v. 2.02 is obsoleted--the current version is 2.03.

The 2.02 matter shows that there is absolutely, positively no such thing as a "trivially minor change". In my haste to tack on one more last-minute little "featurette" to the installer, I put a period where a comma should have gone, rendering that script fatally useless. I rub ashes in my hair and beat my breast. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

My apologies to anyone discomfited by the 2.02 version.

 

Is it possible to add pages to a vBulletin forum as it stands with this tool, or do you have to add a seperate area to place the pages.

 

Thanks Eric. Just when I got 1.09 tweaked the way I liked it.

 

Eric,

Any news on how long it'll take to get the new pages properly indexed in Google?

San

 

Good question, it's been a week now and I still haven't had any indexed.
However I have also been accepted in about 50 directories for over a month now and none of the backlinks have shown up in Google. MSN and Yahoo have been showing them though.

I guess it's just a case of wait it out

 

I got everything installed and made sure to follow instructions, but I don't have any books on my pages. Arrg. Looks like Dup content on everypage. My KeyBooks.us file is huge and has tons of book titles.

 

Sorry to have been away for a while--I'm way past where I need to be with this year's vegetable garden, and the weather waits for no man . . .

First, this: Freebie is now up to 2.04. The new release accomodates a stupid error in, yes, Internet Explorer, that was preventing free-form searches from working on that remarkable piece of, ah, software. There are a couple of other minor things too--for instance, the package will now accomodate PHP versions as old as 4.1.

As to how long it takes the pages to get indexed: as long as it takes any new pages to be added for your site. For some of you, that will be overnight, for others it may be days or possibly weeks. I have had responses from some users suggesting that they are seeing fairly rapid results, but it depends on how often and how heavily the bots normally visit your site.

As to adding to VBulletin: I'm not well familiar with the package, but the Freebie package just lives in a subdirectory of its own, which can be anywhere in your site file system, and you point in to its pages--or, typically, just to its "front door" page--from wherever else on your site you like.

I hope to soon have a 2.05 that will effectively double the number of added pages, by making the ABE used-book links for each title each a separate "page"; I am awaiting feedback from ABE to be sure that what I propose to do meets their Terms of Service, because the process essentially frames their search-response page (but adds nothing to it save an optional Digitalpoint network display at the bottom, which would be plainly labelled as not coming from ABE). If I hear nothing by the end of this business week, I will take it, as the law says, that "silence consents".

 

Freebie 2.05 is now out. It corrects a glitch in the free-form search; it also adds a small new user capability: the user can select a regular search, or--if he or she will accept a slower search--one that seeks valid book-cover images from other Amazon national divisions when one is missing at the division in use.

A v. 2.10, which will effectively double the pages added by the package, is coming soon.

As always, you can download from from the Freebie download page .

 

You had me up until this point...

I can find anything to agree with that statement. Everything I've read, at lease in the vBulletin world, contradicts that statement.

Is it old?

 

OK, the doall.php is a DDOS threat. (VERY SERIOUS)

The directory has no index.

There is a bad link in the footer.

All of the files are set 777, is this necessary?

This is a good idea, however it needs alot of work. Anyone using this should be aware that someone can really make your server unhappy playing with the book updater.

Let me know is ya work it out.

 

Anyone using this should be aware that someone can really make your server unhappy playing with the book updater.

Security is a complex subject, and I do not pose as an expert. There are, though, some points to be made. First, we are not speaking of any particular vulnerability of the scripts to some sort of hacking. I don't think they have any of the commoner PHP vulnerabilities, but I suppose some clever kiddie might eventually find something. But the thing to ask oneself is "Who would bother? And why?" This is not M$ we're talking about, it's a package with a distribution that is, ah, a wee bit smaller than that of than Windoze. Where's the beef?

The "threat" is that some random hacker, visiting your site and scrutinizing everything on it, will decide to start the search script on his own, perhaps multiple times. Yes, yes, very likely. If the idea bothers you, make the directory unreadable--simple enough. Really: if someone has dedicated their life to taking your, and only your, site down with a D.O.S. attack, why would they fiddle with this? Just pump out the calls to any page.

Being careful is one thing, but when, as the song had it, "paranoia strikes deep", a measure of reason is called for.

(I may also add that about the worst thing likely to happen, even if some juvenile really did start a zillion instances of a script, would be--at least on any decent host--that the processes would get shut down. Good hosts don't let servers get run away with by a rogue process or two. In the course of development, I have more than once inadvertently started quite a number of parallel instances of a long-run script, and that is exactly what happens: they just get shut down.

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As to Everything I've read, at lease in the vBulletin world, contradicts that statement (". . . either "Safe Mode" must be Off or PHP must be "cgi-wrapped". Any host that cannot readily meet those conditions for you is a host you should be running away from as fast as you can"). We must be Googling different sources.

To start with, the PHP site itself says It is architecturally incorrect to try to solve this problem [shared-server security] at the PHP level. And no, it's not old, it's new: it's the blind reliance on "safe mode"--as if the very words invoke a papal blessing--that is old.

The reality is that "safe mode" will stop some basic, kindergarten kinds of fiddling, but is not much of a barrier to sophisticated hackers; on the other hand, it is a colossal pain in the elbow to ordinary users, who find that trying to do almost anything when "safe mode" is on is an endless nightmare.

CGI wrappers for PHP have their own security issues, but if tolerably well written are pretty secure while obviating all the horrors of "safe mode." My own opinion--and I remind you again that I do not pose as a security expert--is that being hosted on a reputable host offering CGI-wrapping of PHP is the best way to go.

The bottom line is that security is each web-site operator's concern: we cannot and should not expect it to be handed to us on a silver salver, by the waving of hands in the air and muttering of "safe, safe" or suchlike kludges. Internet security is much like home security: yes, any thief can break into most of the ill-locked home front doors around. But putting in a good deadbolt lock is sufficient for almost all purposes--thieves notoriously look for the easy lays, which are the commonest anyway. Why reach for a crowbar when the house next door will yield to a small screwdriver? Meanwhile, though, anyone whose life goal is breaking into your house will need to find it made of two-foot-thick vanadium steel before he will be effectively stopped (and that may not suffice).

It is a matter of finding a sane balance between the realistic risk and the complexity and cost--in several senses--of measures taken to minimize that risk. If you are convinced that you have an enemy who will attack your site, and will seek out some rather obscure package's php script as his chosen vehicle, then don't use the package. I can live with it.

 

If you want to email me your package-directory URL, I'll be glad to take a look and see what's what (my email link is on every page of the SEO Toys site, as shown in the sig block below).

When all is in order, "duplicate content" is not likely to be an issue, in that each "holder" page lists, typically, several hundred titles, and associated edition data, and each per-title page includes, wherever available, editorial and full reader reviews, quite a lot of text that is individual to the title.

 

I downloaded Freebie last night at 11 and it was up and running by 1. Setup was a breeze, esp since I dont have much related experience!

I had been looking for something along these lines, as many people have asked me about reference books.

Just one question, for the search paramaters in the initialize.inc file, can there be more than one search string? My current topic only pulled out 50 titles.

Thanks.

 

This is my problem too. My site is relevant to more than one topic but none of the topics have a large book list, If I could combine the topics it would be good.
Also does it matter which region is displayed, mine reverts to AmazonJP which displays very few books compared to AmazonUS.

PS: Has anyone had any of these pages indexed by Google yet, I have had them on three sites for a few weeks now but so far nothing.

 

You can, in fact, use something called "complex searches", and I can email you the documentation on it, but I discourage it.

I discourage it not for any deep reason, but owing to its requiring some further customization: because the search phrase you set in the customization file is normally displayed throughout the bookshop pages, if you use complex terms, they will look bizarre, meaning you have to edit the pages to take out the prompts the package looks for (to automatically plug in the phrase) and replace them with some hard-coded words of your choosing.

Example: if I have a web site concerned with the law, I don't want to use just law as my term because it would return too many titles to be practically listable; instead, I use, say, Federal or State Law, United States as my term. Now, though, my front page has this whacking big headline--

The XXXX Web Site's Federal or State Law, United States Book Shop​

--which looks kinda silly.

So, I have to go into the bookshop.htm file and look for every instance of the word "widgets" (because that's what the package replaces with your search phrase) and manually replace it with some word or phrase that accurately conveys the scope or theme of the titles being found.

Aside from that not terribly onerous task, there's no constraint on the search phrase. You can just use the usual set of Boolean words and conventions--and, or, not, parentheses for grouping, and so on, as the example "Federal or State Law, United States" shows.

My own experience, though, is that with a little care you can find an ordinary phrase that is sufficiently relevant, yet yields the wanted total of roughly 3,000 valid titles; the bookcount.php script lets you freely try phrase after phrase with immediate display of how many titles it would get you.

For example, I run a web site on induction cooking and equipment for it. Using the keyword phrase induction cooking, which is what people normally find the site with, produces a whopping zero titles. But, by simply using cookbook, I get a still somewhat high but tolerable 5,000 or so valid titles, and cooking is, in the end, what the site is about. Another example: I operate the web site for a local small-town history-museum society; using history would call over a quarter-million titles, which is silly; even American history is an unmanageable 44,000 or so; but The American West gives me a nice, tidy 3,423 (estimated). The lesson is to think it through: there's almost always a phrase that at once makes sense in relation to your site while yet giving a decent number of titles.

 

See the answer just above this one.

That's curious: they should default to the U.S. In any event, you can set the default division in the link, by using the in= parameter, as discussed in the docfiles. For example, if your front-page file is named widget-books.php (a name you set in the customization file), you would make, say, Canada the default division by linking to the page with:

http://mywidgetsite.com/books-on-widgets/widget-books.php?in=ca​

If no in= is supplied, it should, as I say, default to U.S.

(Recall also that I emphasize very heavily in the docfile that you need to provide six separate links, one for each national division, so that the searchbots can find each distinct bookstore and its contents.)

Speaking for myself and my ten sites using it, there is a great variation, but not a surprising one: the higher-PR sites tend to get their totals in pretty quickly, while the lower-PR ones have to stand in line for a while. That is generally true of any pages of any sort that one adds to sites.

Broadly speaking, I would assume (ha!) that the more links you have scattered about your site to at least the bookshop front page, the more likely it is that the engines will get there sooner.

But it can be bizarre. I have one low-SERPs rarely visited PR-3 site with 19,700 pages showing, but a PR-5 (which was, and will probably be again soon, a PR-6, as it deals with baseball) with 2,410 showing. Go figure.

 

Eric,

I just updated my ad_network.php file from the coop and ads are showing on my site (here). But I'm getting an error on my bookshop.php page (here) and all other pages.

When updating the ad_network.php file for my site, I had to change the passthru.php file also. This leads me to believe the issue is with the coopads.php file. But that's just a guess. Any ideas?

San

 

Eric,

Disregard my last post. I figured out how to modify the coopads.php file to make it work.

San