My Messy Workbench: Gems

Amazon Products Feed: Display the Most Popular Items

2004-06-21T00:36:59-08:00

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.

apf.log The file "apf.log" will contain the results. It's likely to be big, so don't forget to delete it. apf_pop template setup $template_file = "/home/bv126070/public_html/cgi-bin/Amazon/popular_list.template.html"; Identifies the template used by apf_pop to generate the output pages. Include directory path as necessary. $nav_target = "_top"; Specifies the link "target" for links generated for %%see_prev_popular%% and %%see_prev_popular%%, $nav_target = "_self" is useful for popular pages placed within FRAMESETS or IFRAMES, otherwise, "_top" works well. If you specify an empty string, then the links will have no target. apf_pop scans the access log for entries containing an APF AsinSearch. If the item_id field contains only one ASIN, then apf_pop counts it as a click and grabs the ASIN.]]>

IFRAME and Amazon Product Feed:

2004-06-04T21:46:25-08:00

How to display inline searches in your templates and pagesA 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 and . 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. ]]>

So we have a child frame appearing in the parent window with the following configuration An IFRAME named "sidebar" (we'll be using that later), that will hopefully force itself to display at the top of the sidebar it's transparent so whatever colour our sidebar is will show through as wide as the parent sidebar (less 4 pixel margins on each side) will automatically put up scroll bars if there's more data than fits in the frame. won't have a border because we already have one in the parent sidebar. browsers which don't support IFRAMES will display the message instead. Nifty. Now inside that IFRAME is a call to the APF script. This call will perform a similarity search on the current value for %%Asin%%. It's calling a special 'heavy' version of the script which I've lightly hacked in order to get the "heavy" data from AWS, in order to display %%Director%% and %%Starring%% information when available. There's more to this call, but we'll get back to that. For now, let's finish off the IFRAME implementation. Resizable IFRAMEs We've configured our IFRAME to be 750 pixels in height. That's fine when you know how much data the search will return, but we don't. In order to make it resizable, we have to get the IFRAME window and its parent window to have a conversation. "Hey Dad!" "Yes, son?" "I need to be T H I S B I G !!!" Except they're going to talk in javascript. There's a simple example of this here found on this page. I'd save you all the digging, but the code's Terms of Use prevent me from redistributing it. Instead, I'll tell you what you need to do. First, view the source code of this page and find the line "; if ($display_userdata['session_logged_in']) { $quick_reply_form .= ""; } echo $quick_reply_form; // // END Quick Reply Mod // Now, in MT, open the archive template you wish to display the quick comment form in and insert the following code at the very top of the template: Also, place the following code where you want your comments and comment form to appear in your template: ; ThreadDisplay($thread_id); ?> Don't forget to remove the old phpBB comments display from that template! Otherwise, you'll see the phpBB comments displayed twice! That should do it. Save, Rebuild, Etc. and, so long as you're currently logged in to phpBB, you should see a quick comment form. p.]]>

Created a Category Archive Index

2003-12-18T20:37:40-08:00

container.

<$MTCategoryLabel$>

<$MTCategoryLabel$> (<$MTCategoryCount$>): <$MTCategoryDescription$>
<$MTEntryTitle$> :: <$MTCategoryLabel$>

When you rebuild, there'll be a new CategoryIndex in your blog root directory. Just add links in your other templates and you're ready to go. Presently listening to:September Fifteenth - Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays - As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (07:45)/" target="_blank">/" target="_blank">" hspace="4" align="right" border="0"> ]]>

Q: How can I get the category(ies) to display with my entry?

2003-12-15T19:52:45-08:00

<$MTEntryTitle$> I wrapped them in two-cell tables, like this.

<$MTEntryTitle$>

<$MTCategoryLabel$>

The title is in the left hand cell and the piece of code from MT Wiki is in the right-hand cell. I set that cell to right justify. No sweat! p. Presently listening to:Letter to Hiro - The Vapours - New Clear Days - (06:23)/" target="_blank">/" target="_blank">" hspace="4" align="right" border="0"> ]]>

Presently listening to:

2003-12-14T06:10:54-08:00

This is a tutorial for installing a Windows-only implementation for Moveable Type (MT) bloggers, though Mac users may nonetheless find some useful ideas here, as certainly will enthusiasts for other blogging systems.. If you want to be able to insert Amazon links to whatever's playing on Windows Media Player or WinAmp into your blog entries, read on. It's not all that difficult: it does require some trival edits to some of your MT templates, and you'll have to install a couple plug-ins. If you don't already use Zempt 0.3 SharpMT 2.0 or w.Bloggar, you'll need one of these too, if only to generate the required code.

" hspace="4" align="right" border="0">Presently listening to:Regarding Saturday - Sumack - Now Hear This (03:38)/" target="_blank"> That is, munge the format so it generates the necessary plugin code and plops it into your edit window. Turns out that's easy enough too, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. So, the steps from the beginning. Install the MTAmazon plugin as per the instructions here. This plug-in allows MT to get images and links from Amazon via xml. Install the Process Tags plug-in. MT doesn't process any plug-in tags appearing in your entries. Using the Process Tags plug-in, we're going to force it to. Replace all occurrences of '$MTEntryBody$' or 'MTEntryBody' in your templates with 'MTEntryBody process_tags="1"' The templates you need to edit in the default MT implementation are: the Main Index (index.html), the Category Archive, the Date-Based Archive and the Individual Entry Archive. This will force MT to process all MT and plug-in tags appearing in your blog entries every time it rebuilds the site. Note that since your entries typically appear on multiple pages, this could slow your site rebuilds considerably if it's a very big site. Caveat 2 also comes into play here. With the process tags plugin enabled you'll now have to think of all entries on your blog as code. In a sense, your entries are now MT templates. Adam Kalsey, plugin author Using [the process tags plugin] can be dangerous if you don't think about what you are doing. For example, if you have the PerlScript plugin installed, any blog author could execute arbitrary Perl code on your server. Another example would be putting an MTEntries block inside your entry. When MT rebuilt, it would find the MTEntries block in the entry, and load all those entries. One of the entries that it would load would be itself, again causing MT to find the MTEntries block, and so on, creating an infinite loop. I can tell you from personal experience, that last scenario is unpleasant and likely to upset your ISP and the people you're sharing your server with. It makes me nervous just having the MTEntryBody text in this post. You can read all about it in the plugin forum at www.movabletype.org.Comments, which of course any visitor to your site can write, are safe because in this implementation they are not processed by the plugin. Don't extend the process tags plugin to MT comments -- that would be very bad. Install Zempt, w.Bloggar or SharpMT, if you haven't already. Eventually I'll implement a means for doing this without a special editor, but for now this is how we'll generate the MTAmazon plug-in code. Start Zempt, w.Bloggar or SharpMT. In Zempt, open Tools->Preferences from the menu and click on "Music" in the selection list on the left of the dialogue window. With w.Bloggar it's File->Settings, then click on the "Media" tab. For SharpMT, select Tools->Options then click the "Editor" tab. There are two things to do here. First, make sure you've got the proper MediaPlayer or WinAmp software installed. There are links in the Zempt and w.Bloggar dialog windows if you don't. Second, replace the current contents of the media formatting string edit box with the following code.

" hspace="4" align="right" border="0"> Presently listening to:
%T% - %A% - %B% (%D%)

You'll need to remove the formatting, so the whole bit is a single line of text.The %X% stuff is where Zempt and w.Bloggar are going to put the song Title, Artist name, alBum title and song Duration. If you're working with SharpMT, then you need to do some substitution: %T% to [SONG] %A% to [ARTIST] %B% to [ALBUM] %D% to [DURATION] To make your life a little easier I've placed a couple versions of this code, both formatted and unformatted, in MediaInfoString.txt, which you can open in a non-word-wrapped text editor. You might just want to look at your music library in Media Player or WinAmp and make sure all those titles and names are correct, or you'll get some unusual results from Amazon's search. OK. Recheck your steps and you're ready to go. Place your cursor where you want the Presently listening to: code to go, and click on the little musical notes button, wherever it is on your particular editor. Voila! Now, you can either continue editing, or copy and paste the code to whatever other editor you prefer. Happy musical bloggin! p. /" target="_blank">" hspace="4" align="right" border="0">Presently listening to:Biko - Peter Gabriel - Shaking The Tree (06:53)/" target="_blank"> ]]>