"Freebie" Package Users: Urgent Notice

This message is to current users of the "Freebie" SEO site-augmentation package.

Owing to a sudden, unannounced, arbitrary, and needless change in the wording of one of Amazon's reply codes in their AWS XML "service", Freebie versions lower than the just-updated 1.09 (or, for users of the I-Freebie internationalized package, 1.14) will return a glut of false listings--books which are not, in fact, available new through Amazon (only used through some affiliated shop).

Fortunately, for anyone running a version equal to or greater than the old beta 0.98, upgrading is very easy, fast, and simple. (There is a whole separate package docfile on it, but in essence you upload the new package files, run one short script, and download the new files for local backup, the end.)

This upgrade is essentially mandatory.

I deeply regret the inconvenience, but it is an ineluctable concomitant of having incompetents like Amazon for a business partner.

(I have emailed many of the users I know of, but I also know there are many more I don't explicitly know of, hence this posting, repeated on a couple of other forums.)

For your convenience, here is a direct link to the Freebie "Classic" download page . (The Freebie-X and I-Freebie pages are on the same site.)

 

Thanks for the heads up. That upgade was a snap.

 

And haste makes . . . what?

In my rush to get people working versions, I let the upgrade out with a typo--just one semicolon missing in one file, but it crashes the search.

Obviously, a fixed fix is now already up (for all three versions--1.09a for Freebie Classic and Freebie-X, and 1.14a for I-Freebie), but I feel such a total dunce. I forever remind others that there are no "trivial" fixes, then do this.

Arrghhh.