NEW! Amazon Media Manager 1.5 (*Finally!*)

Hi,

I installed this plugin, and while it looks awesome the performance I am seeing is super slow. I notice that all the examples seem to be for 3 or 5 items. I tried it with a list of 20 items and it can take more than 2 or 3 minutes to generate the list! Ouch.

Is this correct? Is this because of some delay with Amazon? Is there any work around?

Any help appreciated. I was thinking to just take the output of the page and cache it somewhere. Is there a plugin or something to do that?

Here is an exmaple of my slow page with about 20 books: https://www.vidalgraupera.com/blog/books/

Thanks,

Vidal.

It would take awhile if it is not cacheing, which I assume this plugin does – or does it not?

VGrauper : All the information you use is held locally, with the exception of the images from Amazon. We did this partly for the sake of simplicity and partly because if storing copies of the images locally was required you’d run into people over-running their hosting space allocation and all that jazz.

I’ve been scratching my head for a little while over the best compromise to the problem, I was thinking perhaps a user-defined space limit on a folder to which the N most recently requested images would be copied. The system would check there 1st, and check Amazon second.

This feature is however going to have to wait until all our other deadlines and jobs are clear, or until someone gives us some money ??

Splunk : Your assumption is correct, but the error is inexplicable as tests both on our local server and my own blog showed the upgrade script functioning correctly. Please contact me via my website with more details about your setup and I’ll see what I can do.

Oh also VGrauper : could you please test if my assumption is correct by removing all the image tags from your template and seeing if you setill get the same delay? Don’t want to be chasing wild geese…

Hi,

First, thanks for the super quick reply.

I edited the template to omit the images and now it works super fast. The slowness therefore appears related to gettting the images from Amazon. If these were cached, I assume the problem would go away.

Why not just add the images to the DB when you add all the other info into the DB the first place? The image is not likely to change. This would be simpler than caching the last N images.

At least for me, space is not an issue.

Vidal.

Besides the issues already mentioned regarding sheer storage size, it is complicated by the fact you can request images by size. In the sidebar I use the small image, in the main page either medium and large (I think there are also sizes inbetween). That’s a lot of duplication and to store them in my database or cache them – no thanks. Better to limit the number of images per page.

Echoing Beel on this one, what is not a concern for you yeilds 3287 support emails for us ??
If we acted without concern, it’d be written in pure PHP5, or perhaps Ruby, you see where I’m going with that…

Anyhow, what appears to be the best solution at present would be to allow the user to specify an optional cache of user-defined size to keep the N latest images requested. OK it’s not fantastic, especially if you’re displaying random books, but for index pages or large displays it’ll certainly cut down load times. Bear in mind that wherever the images are stored, the end user still has to download them.

Looking on amazon, the average small thumbnail is approximately 4kb. Assuming you have 20 books listed on your page, you’ve just given a modem user a 20-25 second load time without really trying, regardless of the the location of the images.

There will be a version 2.0 (Or maybe a 1.6 to co-incide with WordPress) and the presence of a cache will most likely be there.

Don’t forget you can request items from your AMM by ID, so it wouldn’t be hard to draw up a scheme whereby your index has a list of links to individual items. If i get time, I’ll demonstrate how to do this on the AMM website.

I had been using AMM successfully for a while now, but when I activated a new theme I got the following error:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: https://mysite.com/ Line Number 245, Column 9: <!–

I’m using the following code:
<?php amm_getMedia(‘amm_debug_output’,1,AMM_DVD); ?>
<?php amm_getMedia(‘amm_debug_output’,1,AMM_MUSIC); ?>
<?php amm_getMedia(‘amm_debug_output’,1,AMM_BOOKS); ?>

How can I correct this error? Please help.

Hi there,

Please use Pastecode or noPaste, and copy the whole of your HTML source for the broken page into it, then post the link here or contact me via email.

The problem is likely some conflict between your AMM template output and the HTML in your new page template, but without being able to see ther sourcecode I cannot give you a clearer answer.

People, forget about AMM what about a theme for the site. I like the site design crisp and easy to navigate! great job!

Say what now? Which site?

Hi, I’ve just started using AMM and I think it’s terrific. I’m having one problem: I can’t get AMM to display images of different sizes. Even when, for instance, I use the amm_debug_output() function that comes with the plugin, the all the images are the same size (a small size) and all the image URLS returned are the same, like this:

LargeImg: https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521785235.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg

MedImg: https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521785235.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg

SmallImg: https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521785235.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg

image(25): https://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521785235.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg

Obviously something isn’t working, but I can’t figure out what it is. I’m using WP 1.5.2, and the plugin seems to work great otherwise. (The only other issue is on the AMM Management Console, where the “Search For” drop-down box has no choices available — it doesn’t show any options. Don’t know if this problem is related.)

Thanks for any help.

Not sure if you’re the person I helped recently by email or not, but it’s definately the same problem.

In the code the image URLS are automatically generated and then checked to see if they are valid. If the check fails, the URL stored in the AMM database is used (This comes from the Amazon search results).

Some servers do not support the remote checking and, until we get chance to fix it, this fact will remain “un-reported” to the user.

Now, if you open up amm_output.php and head down to line 591 (If you are using the latest code, which is on the website) and change line 591 to read:


// if ( $imageinfo === FALSE ) $image = $this->currentItem['amm_smallImageURL'];


The check will be disabled and your multi-size images should work. bear in mind though, that should the item you search for have broken images, you won’t get a safe fallback anymore. It’s an unfortunate compromise :/

(Usually though, the only amazon items that screw up are their user-submitted marketplace items so it’s not much of a problem)

As for the Search-For dropdown box in the console, please check you don’t have JavaScript disabled and let me know which browser you’re using, we had a report that the JS wasn’t behaving in Safari but we thought we’d resolved it…

Hi – thanks for your very quick and helpful reply. Your solution addressed my problem directly (I wasn’t the person who emailed you though) and now AMM is working as advertised. It’s really a terrifically useful plugin.

As for the dropdown box: Yes, I’m using Safari, 2.0.1 (the most recent release, I believe) on Mac OS 10.4.2 and that menu doesn’t work. The “Choose a Country” menu works, but not the “Search For…” menu. It works fine on Firefox.

Thanks again.

I am having the same problem as someone else had, but no one has offered a solution that I see. When I enter the example function “amm_my_first_go”, I get an error:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ in /home/alishahu/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/amm/amm_extras.php on line 92

I have changed bits and pieces, deleted lines, and the only thing that doesn’t bring up this error on the last line of the file is when I leave the file as it originally was (without the function at all). There is not a “$” in the last line.

Please help!