Comments for Money-Code

Comment on eBay and Twitter.. some confusion by Wayne John

Wayne John — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:26:51 +0000

It sure doesn’t make me feel comfortable with my relationship with eBay, knowing the level of disorganization and mis-communication that is happening behind the scenes.
Wayne John´s last blog ..Hitler gets Google slapped

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by markowe

markowe — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:26:20 +0000

Yes, I am trying to write as much resuable code so that I can flexibly specify what fields are pulled out where, what columns headings go where etc. I can create basic product listings etc. from just about any CSV file with a few judicious changes in a config file. But that would be hard to translate into a user-friendly backend for a less savvy user. And there are always things that have to be custom-written – custom joins, auxiliary tables to hold things like categories. Musn’t get started on product category hierarchies – every advertiser has a different implementation, but most boil down to having to explode one field into lots of little ones, by whatever separator they happen to have used, which for say 50,000 products is just too heavy on the server – still trying to figure out how to make this easy on the server AND easily customisable… The problems go on… What happens if you want to do some product comparison – that’s all this multiplied to the nth power because you’ve got to harmonise the data somehow. No wonder people pay to use aggregated feeds – someone else has done all the work… On the upside, once you have succeeded, you probably have a set of data that is unlike anyone else’s and thus avoids footprint problems.

By the way, LOAD DATA INFILE is an absolute godsend for large imports! Not so good if you want to aggregate data though…
markowe´s last blog ..Quality Click Pricing – evil or good?

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by admin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:48:01 +0000

markowe

I hear you on all counts. That’s my biggest issue with the CSV route, having to massage the data in every instance. I might play with the idea of PHP CLI script to the import (I already have some code here on the site somewhere), but then write a plugin with shortcode filters in there to craft the query, etc.

I hear you on the footprint. I try to avoid that as well.
h

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by markowe

markowe — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:32:41 +0000

You know, I wish I could sit down and actually write something user-friendly and scalable enough to market, but even if I did I just haven’t got the resources to support a paying product. And I can’t really give it away cos I’ll just have zillions of sites with the same footprint as mine! Maybe I’ll release the code I wrote to check for a new feed once every 24 hours, download, rapidly unzip, import etc. Does some of that as shell processes so as to avoid overloading the server, quite happy with it. But then you’ve got to figure out what to do with that data, each CSV has a different data structure etc. so you can’t really write a one-size-fits-all script. If you have any ideas, I’d be happy to hear them!
markowe´s last blog ..Quality Click Pricing – evil or good?

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by Wayne John

Wayne John — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:28:14 +0000

CJ Wordpress plugin? Who knew. I didn’t. At least, I haven’t reached the point where I can start tapping CJ yet…I’m still working the eBay and AdSense angle, but CJ is on my list.

Markowe, are you going to sell your code?
Wayne John´s last blog ..Make Money Online Status Report for December 2009 and the year

Comment on Pay Attention to your Roll-Your-Own EPN sites by Wayne John

Wayne John — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:24:41 +0000

Ok, so we have some more querystring elements to define I guess. I really wish they would announce changes like this. After all, they have to know that the changes they make could have a huge impact on their affiliates….right?

Wow, I’m not impressed with eBay’s development team at all.

I’m glad I’m not running BANS too…I prefer to know my code I guess.
Wayne John´s last blog ..Make Money Online Status Report for December 2009 and the year

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by admin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:22:37 +0000

I agree markowe about using the CSV instead of the API. I sweat I go back and forth on this. I want the ease and quick implementation of the API, but I like the ability to suck in a datafeed into a local database and reference that instead. I just hate the set up, the fetch, etc. Do you know of any decent WP plugins that can do this? Normally, I roll my CJ sites that use datafeeds, but would like to use WordPress for the ease of crankin’ out sites.

I just finished tweaking the plugin to cache, so we’ll see how it works. I’ll be doing some real word testing later this afternoon.

Comment on Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin by markowe

markowe — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:16:46 +0000

Agreed that CJ’s API is very shaky. Also, compared to Amazon’s and eBay’s APIs, it looks very poor indeed. You get about 10 different data fields, and no advanced searching features whatsoever. Even the CSV files you can order from CJ are richer in data – I am writing an app which uses those at the moment. It’s more reliable too – don’t have to worry about caching in case the server’s down.
markowe´s last blog ..Quality Click Pricing – evil or good?

Comment on Amazon Product API: SignatureDoesNotMatch error response by admin

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:21:03 +0000

Hello Mo

Can you show me your simple_aws_signed_request() call? Sounds like you might have a syntax error there.

Thanks!
hanji

Comment on Amazon Product API: SignatureDoesNotMatch error response by Mo

Mo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:31:05 +0000

I am Barbara Ling’s poor Amazon-ignorant hubby.

Before August 2009 the effect of HMAC-SHA256 token signature API, our following URL request had always worked fine to bring back 2 pages of results that give a list of items that match Keywords ‘ma rolloer’ together with each item’s ID, icon, description, and reviews.

The request is made in PHP with the file_get_contents() function call.

file_get_contents(
‘http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=__OurID___&Operation=ItemSearch&ItemSearch.Shared.SearchIndex=Blended&ItemSearch.Shared.Keywords=ma%20roller&ItemSearch.Shared.ResponseGroup=ItemIds,Images,ItemAttributes,Reviews,EditorialReview&ItemSearch.1.ItemPage=1&ItemSearch.2.ItemPage=2‘
);

I broke up the single long line of query into shorter lines to show more clearly all the individual query parameters.

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml\
?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=__OurID___\
&Operation=ItemSearch\
&ItemSearch.Shared.SearchIndex=Blended\
&ItemSearch.Shared.Keywords=ma%20roller\
&ItemSearch.Shared.ResponseGroup=ItemIds,Images,ItemAttributes,Reviews,EditorialReview\
&ItemSearch.1.ItemPage=1\
&ItemSearch.2.ItemPage=2

This query request URL no longer works after August 2009.

I recently began to add Ulrich Mierendorff’s (THANKS to him and others who pointed me there) PHP function aws_signed_request() code for meeting HMAC-SHA256 token signature requirement.

I followed the instructions given at
http://www.money-code.com/2009/08/amazon-product-api-signaturedoesnotmatch-error-response/comment-page-1/#comment-792
to call aws_signed_request() to build and send the same query.

I tried a number of variations and always get back the following response:

WS.InvalidOperationParameter The Operation parameter is invalid. Please modify the Operation parameter and retry. Valid values for the Operation parameter include TagLookup, ListLookup, CartGet, SellerListingLookup, CustomerContentLookup, ItemLookup, SimilarityLookup, SellerLookup, ItemSearch, VehiclePartLookup, BrowseNodeLookup, CartModify, ListSearch, CartClear, VehiclePartSearch, CustomerContentSearch, CartCreate, TransactionLookup, VehicleSearch, SellerListingSearch, CartAdd, Help.

Even using the Operation=Help parameter-value pair returns the same response message.

Please help. THANKS in advance.