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Freebie 2.10 out: double your added-pages count.

Discussion in 'Products & Tools' started by Owlcroft, Mar 28, 2005.

  1. #1
    "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).

    The package has now undergone a significant upgrade: the ABE used-book link for each title is now effectively a separate page of your site, which doubles the virtual pages that the package is adding to your site. Coupled with the recent chnage that makes each Freebie bookshop into six distinct bookshops (one for each Amazon national division), the package is now capable of adding something like 18,000 pages to a site (that would be 3,000 titles a division times 2 pages a title).

    There have been a few other small improvements as well. As always, you can check it out by downloading it from
    the Freebie home page.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 28, 2005 IP
    wendydettmer and Jim bob 9 pants like this.
  2. Jim bob 9 pants

    Jim bob 9 pants Peon

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    #2
    I would like to say that it is a great product, and easy to set up. Also you have lots of ability to intergrate into a fromat similar to your main site - even for a noggin like me!

    Thank you Owlcraft for a great system and your personal support -A1
     
    Jim bob 9 pants, Mar 28, 2005 IP
  3. alias420

    alias420 Guest

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    #3
    there is another tool out there similar to this it reproduces Amazon products on your site even ads a shopping cart. I saw one site that is on the ad network using it and it gives him 27,000 indexed pages to harvest some nice weight.
     
    alias420, Mar 28, 2005 IP
  4. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #4
    An aside: I deliberately do *not* use the Amazon "Remote Shopping Cart" feature because it has been and remains notoriously buggy--moreover, it does not have equal feature sets across national divisions. When a visitor clicks on the "Buy" button, the purchase is added direct to his or her Amazon Shopping Cart, but is not handled by a "remote cart" at your site. My feeling is that this has very little to do with the purchase rate.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 28, 2005 IP
  5. Juls

    Juls Well-Known Member

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    #5
    awesome. I just setup your previous version a while ago and now going to swap to your new version... Thanks for the excellent script. :)

    would you recommend against not using it alone for a site?

    love it.
     
    Juls, Mar 28, 2005 IP
  6. wendydettmer

    wendydettmer Peon

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    #6
    I hope to implement this in my site within the next few weeks, as soon as a few other projects are taken care of. I did have a question though. I signed up for the ABE affiliate program, but was unable to find my client number in the html tag, as it did not look like it was set up the same as the instructions stated. Any idea what I may be missing?
     
    wendydettmer, Mar 28, 2005 IP
  7. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #7
    They make it needlessly difficult to find this critical datum. What I do is this:

    1. Log in to your Commission Junction account.

    2. In the menu banner, click on Get Links.

    3. At the resulting page, click on By Relationship.

    4. At the resulting page, click on View Links at the combination link Abebooks.com » View Links.

    5. At the resulting page, clink on Get HTML (way over in the far right column) for any listed ad.

    6. A window will pop up, showing the ad HTML and some other stuff above it; in that other stuff, look for the line showing the PID datum. That's the ID Number you want.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  8. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #8
    Sorry: in honesty, I don't quite understand the question.

    Give me a rephrasing and I'll be glad to answer as best I can.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  9. exam

    exam Peon

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    #9
    He probably wants to know if it would be recommendable to create a site using only your script.
     
    exam, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  10. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #10
    He probably wants to know if it would be recommendable to create a site using only your script.
    Hmmm . . . never thought about that before.

    But I suppose I don't see any reason why not--it is a legitimate enough package; were I doing that, though, I'd at least put in an index page that says a little something about what kind of books are carried in this bookstore (and which provides a place to put in the six different links to the six "national" bookshops, so the search bots can find all six).

    Afterthought, edited in: do remember the discussion in the Install docfile, about practical limits to numbers of titles: don't try to make a bookshop listing 20,000 titles or something, because it won't do you any great good--the alpha pages will eventually hit the Google 101k page-size limit.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  11. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #11
    Users and potential users of Freebie should be aware that Amazon is at present trying to resolve a long-standing (c. a month now) and well-known bug in their software, and that bug has an impact on Freebie.

    Amazon is at present only able to return a maximum of 250 pages (2,500 titles) via its AWS XML service in response to *any* search request, even though the returned XML will correctly (and thus misleadingly) state the true number of pages that *should* be available.

    In the package docs, I recommend that users pick a search phrase that returns roughly three thousand valid titles in their preferred national division; but, because the package only lists real books that are actually immediately available to be bought, roughly 70% of the returned titles in any search will typically be discarded (Amazon lists a *lot* of books it hasn't had in ages, partly to benefit those selling used books through it--but the package uses ABE for used books, for various reasons).

    Therefore, a "good" Freebie search needs to return roughly 10,000 titles, or 1,000 XML pages. The Amazon bug is thus, for now, reducing page counts to about a quarter of what they should be for those seeking a count at or around the optimum.

    This sisue *should* be resolved by Amazon soon (associates are screaming on the AWS forum), but I wanted everyone to be aware of it, so they don't wonder about their titles total versus what they expect from the bookcount estimator in the package.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  12. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #12
    Now that I look, I see that Amazon has added yet another "unavailability phrase" with no warning, and some unavailable books are slipping through the package's filters. (A real software shop would use codes, not ever-varying text phrases.)

    Anyway, anyone using Freebie should--using a plain text editor--add the following line anywhere in the package file unavails.inc (which was made a separate file for just this sort of thing):

    this item is currently not available

    It doesn't matter where in the file you put it, just avoid blank lines in the file. (After the next update, blank lines won't matter.)

    Sorry. It's hard to keep up with Amazon's zany escapades.
     
    Owlcroft, Mar 29, 2005 IP
  13. wendydettmer

    wendydettmer Peon

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    #13
    I'm not seeing PID anywhere. I'll keep playing with that, but can i just go ahead and set it up now and go back and ad that in later, or will that just be a hassle?
     
    wendydettmer, Apr 1, 2005 IP
  14. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #14
    You're fine to go as is. When you track down the PID, just enter it into customize.inc and upload the modified file. Till you do that, you will, of course, not get any ABE commissions, but everything will work normally. You won't have to re-run a search, or even use pull.php, inasmuch as the PID is used on a per-call basis as found in customize.inc.

    What are you seeing when you try to find the PID at Commission Junction? Are you getting the popup window they use, or do you perhaps have popups blocked? (I hate sites that require them)
     
    Owlcroft, Apr 1, 2005 IP
  15. Scott

    Scott Peon

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    #15
    Thanks, trying this tomorrow (it's 1:30am now).
     
    Scott, Apr 1, 2005 IP
  16. wendydettmer

    wendydettmer Peon

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    #16
    Eric,

    I feel silly now - i did manage to find it once i turned off the popup blocker. thanks for the help. now i just need my hosting company to behave and i'll be fine!
     
    wendydettmer, Apr 1, 2005 IP