My Messy Workbench: Notebook

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.]]>

Rand McNally travel store no longer sells Eagle Creek

2004-01-09T06:54:57-08:00

Have to update the affiliate links on multimedia guerilla 'cause the merchant's no longer selling travel supplies (wish they'd tell us they're doing that!) While I'm in there, might as well get around to updating the whole page with embedded links to REI and popups. [EDIT] Done with the Rand McNally stuff. and made some headway with the general page update. Now just need to complete that. [EDIT Jan 19, 04] Done for now with link updates. Won't bother with popups for the timebeing.

Wolfe Camera dropped from linkshare merchant list

2004-01-09T06:37:53-08:00

So I'll have to update the Fujifilm affiliate links in my bicycle touring packing list outfitting the multimedia traveller and to some new merchant. [DONE] Actually, wasn't linked to Wolfe Camera anyway, but this got me motivated to clean up some of the other stuff.

Side blogs

2004-01-06T08:53:17-08:00

" hspace="4" align="right" border="0">Presently listening to:A Place for my Head - Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (03:04)&keyword=&mode=music">/" target="_blank"> ]]>

[EDIT 21 JAN 04] OK, got one down -- http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/004014.php You can see it at work under the Counter Flow heading in the sidebars. Just beware that step #3 can cause problems for some php versions. See http://www.onaje.com/php/article.php4/43 for reasons why. Next I'll work on the MT Sideblog tutorials which have an interesting implementation of MTAmazon!

Redecorating MyMessy Workbench

2004-01-05T00:43:20-08:00

" hspace="4" align="right" border="0">Presently listening to:Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel - Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats (04:20)&keyword=&mode=music">/" target="_blank"> ]]>

Renovating and redecorating the eJournal site

2004-01-01T20:06:05-08:00

Been redecorating over on the eJournal site. Like it? In the process I also discovered the site's become so large the free site search engine from Master.com was no longer indexing all the pages (max, 30MB, and the site's over that by nearly 10 MB.) Spent a fair bit of time renovating the search facilities. To accommodate all that content, I split the search between photo galleries and text pages, which brings the page count and total size under the minimums, for now. The image gallery alone chews up 29MB -- and that's only counting the text on 1900 pages!) While I was at the search bit, also added indexing and search for these blogs to the text search (example) The Master.com engine's a good one -- the advanced search options are pretty powerful (example). Great functionality for a free service -- particularly considering the page/size maximums are a very generous 5000/30MB. Very few sites attain such sizes. Being on the subject of search engines, I've deployed ht:dig on the Suitable for Framing online gallery. It's open source, meaning not only is it free, you get a copy of the source code to mess around with. On that site, I extended ht:dig to display thumbnails of the images returned by the search (example). Pretty nifty, actually. It may be time to revisit ht:dig for the eJournal picture gallery search, just to get the thumbnails. I'd have gone with ht:dig the first time around, but my synaptic.bc.ca ISP at the time didn't support the software libraries required. Perhaps my newest ISP does? p.