Comments on: Amazon Plugin Authorization

By: Martin Kliehm

Martin Kliehm — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:53:04 +0000

Hi Josiah,

if you look into the XSL files (amtap-html-content.v3.xsl and amtap-html-sidebar.v3.xsl) you’ll see commented blocks of XSL code. If you don’t want an image, remove the code block beneath the comment <-- Item image -->. There’s also a block titled “Price,” where different prices are pulled in. If you change the XSL I’d recommend to save a working copy of the file first. After you have changed it, validate that the document is still well-formed (only check the well-formed checkbox). Also it seems like Amazon (and my plugin) caches your request, so set the cache age option to “1” and be patient for a few minutes until the Amazon proxy requests a new XSL file.

If that sounds too complicated: yes, I agree. I’m considering an optional set-up where users can choose which items they would like to show along with their price preferences etc., but I can’t predict when I will find the time…

By: Josiah Staggs

Josiah Staggs — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:28:29 +0000

Hey Martin,

I love the plugin! I'm working on a new site that will be selling products that are listen on amazon. The only thing i need from Amazon as of now is the price of individual items. I'm wondering how i can go about ONLY pulling the price of a product and leaving the rest out. I hope you have the time to reply back. I'm not much of a coder so this basically a plea lol

By: Martin Kliehm

Martin Kliehm — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:13:16 +0000

Sorry for the delay. I just upgraded to WordPress 2.9.1, and everything works fine. I think a problem might be that the WordPress upgrade process asks you to delete wpcontent/cache, so the folder is gone and with it all folder permission settings. You probably have to create the folder again and set the read/write permissions accordingly (or next time, just delete the cache folder contents, but keep the folder intact). Also the plugin writes a text file as confirmation that the key has been validated into the same folder. I admit this is annoying when you upgrade WordPress as that requires you to run the validation again on the plugin’s options page after you upgraded. It seemed like a reasonable idea to keep all files in an existing cache folder when I wrote the plugin, but looking back it would be better to keep the confirmation file in the plugin’s folder. I’ll fix that in a future version.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:25:06 +0000

Does this plugin not work with Wordpress 2.9.1? I can’t get amazon machine tags to show up on any pages anymore since the update. Is there a fix for this planned?

By: Bryce

Bryce — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:42:42 +0000

I just installed Amazon Machine Tags on my WordPress 2.9.1 blog, and set all the configuration options, but it doesn’t seem to work. Nothing shows up in a post or page when I put a tag there, and the tag itself shows up in the sidebar if I place it in a widget. Can you help me troubleshoot this?

By: Wolfgang

Wolfgang — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:43:15 +0000

Special words in article prevent displaying covers and all info from amazon

Hello,

I got the problem, that there are some stop words, which prevent the Plugin working properly, e.g. casino, krasinski and some other. Probably this is something amazon has included but it is really annoying because it means I cannot write about the movie “casino royale” or the actor “John Krasinski”. Covers aren´t displayed / No link to amazon

Can anyone confirm this and has got the same problem? Is there a workaround?

By: Maike

Maike — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:34:56 +0000

Hey, I’ve got a very big problem with mytemplates. any changes on the xsl files don’t take any effect. Best Regards

By: MJ

MJ — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:44:07 +0000

Hi Martin, Great job! I love the plugin, installed it with ease.

The one challenge I'm still having is how to access the XML to change the image size from small to medium. I have the "debug" box checked in the options. But when I bring up the HTML sourcecode for the posts (I'm using Amazon Machine Tags in the post, not the sidebar), I don't see the commented links that you mentioned in previous responses.

Am I looking in the right place?

And, once I find the XML files, do I have to change them one at a time? Or is there a global setting I can switch?

Thanks! MJ

By: Carsten Knoch

Carsten Knoch — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:11:29 +0000

Hey Martin,

I've been noticing something that's a little puzzling to me. I connect to regular old amazon.com to get CD and book cover images using Amazon Machine Tags.

The prices it retrieves are typically lower than than price actually listed when you click through to Amazon. What is the price the plugin retrieves? Am I missing something configuration detail?

Let me know what I might be doing wrong... Thanks.

By: Gregory Foster

Gregory Foster — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:50:04 +0000

Hi Martin, Thank you for a very useful plugin. Just got it working in the sidebar on a new 2.8.6 WP installation. I ran into a problem worth mentioning. If your server timeclock is incorrect, and outside the bounds of Amazon's current timestamp, requests to verify one's credentials/access keys will fail. An error message will be displayed on the Amazon Machine Tags settings page indicating there was a problem with the credentials. I checked the XML response file you so thoughtfully save in the cache, and observed the Amazon error code AWS.TimestampExceedsTimeToLive and the error message "Timestamp 2009-11-30T00:21:53Z is more then 900 seconds before current time 2009-11-30 03:29:39Z." Sure enough, I checked my server clock and it was off by 3 hours. Setting the correct server time and refreshing the Amazon Machine Tags settings page fixed the problem.

Thanks for a sweet plugin!