For eJournal Stuff: create a design for the Daoist symbol for Yin&Yang with the symbol as a road sign along a curvy highway...

About apf_pop.cgi

MrRat's amazon_product_feeds.cgi script (APF) is a marvellously useful script. It's robust and nimble interface provides rich opportunities for exploitation. Here's a script most webmasters of APF sites will find useful. The apf_pop.cgi script searches your website's access log for specific kinds of APF calls that indicate a user clilcking on an item and grabs the Amazon ASIN's from them. The ASINs are counted and sorted, then one or more documents are constructed to display them. In addition to the data formatting templates available through APF, apf_pop adds an additional templating layer with its own variables. The type of document apf_pop can generate is virtually unlimited: HTML, SHTML, PHP, CGI, even output an APF template, if you like. As this implies, through apf_pop you can display data generated by APF in either dynamic or static documents. Continue reading "Amazon Products Feed: Display the Most Popular Items"

How to display inline searches in your templates and pages

A Newbie Tutorial

On my HTML pages I figured out how to use SSI to display the results of amazon_product_feed searches on my web pages. However, Neither the SSI or PHP methods described in the documentation will work if placed within the templates. I've got this great sidebar in my page design but very few of the useful Amazon Product Feed variables are available at the page template level. What to do?

There are two HTML options <OBJECT> and <IFRAME>. These are fairly well supported on the more popular browsers, though OBJECT is the only one of the two specified in the HTML 4.0 standards. Nonetheless, I went with IFRAME for some of its more useful features.

Continue reading "IFRAME and Amazon Product Feed:"

Dive Into Mark's code

I have been providing links to Amazon.com on this site (www.synaptic.bc.ca) for a few years now and have been trying to figure out a way to expand the utility so folks from parts of the world outside the US could take advantage of the links.

No way.

So the question has been, "How do I provide multiple links to the other Amazon sites without having to do a whole lot of work?"

A: amazon_products_feed.cgi, (AFP) a free CGI script from MrRat @ AbsoluteFreebies.com

This is one of those no-brainer decisions. Installs in minutes and the generic interface works straight out of the box. Add some custom templating and you get something that looks like this! Well, actually, that took a fair bit of work, but it looked pretty similar to that on the very first go.

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), the script natively supports US, UK and German affiliations, and with a little templating it's a cinch to add product links for Amazonia to your Canadian, French and Japanese affiliations as well.

I've not incorporated it into my blogspace yet, but I will, and will also update the macros I wrote to call MTAmazon. It may be possible to sidestep MTAmazon completely. I run multiple blogs which share templates, so there are some issues I need to work out regarding how to to get the macros to tell (AFP) which template to use, but it ain't rocket science.

In the meantime, I'll share a couple tidbits for cool AFP implementation tricks in the comments below. ('cause one of them is already marked-up for phpBB anyway.)

Permalink

Google and Yahoo rankings in the extended portion of this entry (saves rebuild time).

Continue reading "Google and Yahoo ranking test IV"

During the compiling of the Media Things sideblog listing, if an MTAmazon keyword search fails then the entry is not displayed.

Need to fix that, so films like The Corporation, which will someday come available, but have no ASIN yet, will be displayed.

During the compiling of the Media Things sideblog listing, if an MTAmazon keyword search fails then the entry is not displayed.

Need to fix that, so films like The Corporation, which will someday come available, but have no ASIN yet, will be displayed.

Just a link to generate a trackback ping for testing

clairvoyance

Need to put a decision/switch statment in the <ahref> ctag macro which will simply replace the ctag content back to the page, rather than just blanking it out.

BlogRolling - The best link manager for your weblog and more!

Gotta get a bit more into this.

cOUNTER fLOW is a sideblog intended to generate a list of links in a sidebar. You'll see it performing its intended job lower down in the sidebar of the index page. However, it didn't take long for it to grow into a regular blog, with categories, RSS feeds, comments, the whole lot.

If you would like priviliges to post links in cOUNTER fLOW, you'll first have to cut your teeth in the eJournal Message Forums. A few dozen entries should be enough for us to determine whether your editorial sense is what we're looking for.

Continue reading "Posting to cOUNTER fLOW"

The template currently in use is the NoMad Man version. Need to update this. Should create a new IndexedEntry module and incorporate the phpbb comment engine integrations.

Gotta figure out blogrolling. Only have one friend who runs a blog @ http://www.brainnoodles.com/, but I've been noticing some blogs worth acknowledging from this site.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/09/26/rss_20_template

It's making my head spin too much to try and deal with this now.