Bookspree.com

I just checked in a new version of Affiliate-Easel-for-Amazon which has 2 major changes:

Error Handling

There was a problem with errors sometimes appearing on pages near the end of each hour. This was not caused by our plugin but by Amazon’s new “Efficiency Guidelines.”

Amazon has limited the number of requests to their API per account, per hour starting October 2010. This is unfortunate but apparently some users were sending repeated data requests to Amazon for purposes other than selling. However, if you are selling items through the API (that includes this plugin) Amazon will increase your limit.

The errors used to spew a bunch of URL text and PHP errors. Now it simply says “Amazon Error” and a title attribute explains the likely reason. It’s not perfect but the only way to reduce this error is to sell more things.

Thanks Amazon.

Image only

This was something I planned all along but only just added. If you want to add only the image of an item in a post or excerpt, just include the attribute only=image and all the titles, prices, etc, will be turned-off. Use it like this:
[az_easel item="0439023521" only=image]. I will add this to the documentation next. Other, non-visible attributes will still work.

I also just added the option to specify outbound links as rel=nofollow and to open in a new window target="_blank". It’s a control in the affiliate-easel-for-amazon admin panel if you update to version 1.1.

Thanks to Justin Germino for suggesting and testing this new feature.

Starting with version 1.1.0 Affiliate-Easel now allows you to place a search bar in any post or page. This is not a widget (which has been supported since version 1.0) but another shortcode you can put in your post.

The code looks something like this: [easel_search page=http://bookspree.com/easel/?page_id=45 select=Books]

The actual widget looks like this (Try it. It works!):

The page attribute is the page you want to use for results of the search. It’s optional BUT if you don’t include it, it will return results on the page you are on. That’s OK IF you have a node search widget on the page, the search results will appear in it. If not, there won’t be any search results. You can either use the slug for the page (the part of the URL after your blog homepage address) or the full URL of the page.

The select attribute allows you to choose which category is chosen in the search-bar menu. This is useful if you want to have a page on a topic and encourage searches to also be in that topic. It is also optional and if you don’t include it, it will default to “All.” The list of categories is the same as the index attribute in the az_easel shortcode.