jhanbackjr

Hello, denmuel.

Thanks for trying ScrapeAZon. When I load your site, I see the shortcode you’re using displayed as the content of the post. That might mean you typed or pasted the shortcode in “Visual” mode rather than “HTML” mode when you created the post. The other possibility is that the plugin is installed but was not activated. Make sure you click the “activate” link for ScrapeAZon from the WordPress plugins page once the plugin is installed.

Let me know how it goes and if I can be of further assistance!

James

No problem. Thank you for the review and thank you for using GoodReviews.

Hello, tbloftis.

The problem with 9781475233636 appears to be that Goodreads does not have the ISBN you provided associated with that title in their database. Therefore, the API returns an error code to the GoodReviews plugin when it searches for a record for that ISBN.

To illustrate, if you go to Goodreads.com and search for 9781475233636, you receive an error page:

https://www.goodreads.com/search?query=9781475233636

If you search for the book by title (“blood rites”) many results are returned, including the record for your title. However, the Goodreads record for your title ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13070346-blood-rites ) doesn’t display an ISBN associated with it, which means that the Goodreads API can’t retrieve your title by using the ISBN.

The current version of the GoodReviews plugin only allows searching Goodreads by using the ISBN. I plan to add a feature that enables searching by Goodreads ID in addition to ISBN, but I do not yet have a timeline for that addition to the plugin.

In the meantime, the best course of action would be to contact a Goodreads librarian and request that they add the appropriate ISBN to their record for your title. When the ISBN issue is corrected, GoodReviews should be able to retrieve the title without a problem.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

James

Hello, tbloftis.

There is no restriction on the number of books you can use GoodReviews to display. There are a few things that could cause a book to not display. Many times, it’s a result of placing the shortcode in Visual mode rather than HTML mode. Additionally, Goodreads can restrict the information it allows to be displayed through the API depending on copyright ownership. That’s why some book covers display through the API and some do not.

If you can send me a link to the page in question (and the ISBN of the title you are attempting to retrieve), I’ll see if I can help you track down the problem.

Thanks for using GoodReviews.

James

Hello, dmfanella.

Thanks for using ScrapeAZon. The review area is served in an iframe, the content of which comes directly from Amazon.com.. Therefore, there is no option or ability from within ScrapeAZon to change the styling inside the iframe.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance and thanks again for using the plugin.

James

Hi, Tim.

Thanks for the update. I’ll keep an eye out. When I get some time, I might see if I can reproduce what’s happening on your client’s site in a development environment just to see if there is, indeed, a conflict.

Thanks again for using ScrapeAZon.

James

Hi, Tim.

I believe you should be able to use the relative URL (without a preceding slash) in the “Never Cache These Pages” field.

Let me know how it goes.

James

Hi, Tim.

No problem at all. Happy to help. I have successfully used ScrapeAZon and W3 Total Cache together in the past. On one site, I have the garbage collection interval for W3 Total Cache’s “page cache” and “object cache” set to 3600 seconds (once per hour). That should mean that pages and objects get cached for no more than an hour at a time. Additionally, I have the “plugins” group configured as a “non-persistent” group in the object cache settings. I’m not certain on this, but I believe that means ScrapeAZon (and other plugin content) isn’t cached at all. On my particular site, an hour’s cache appears to provide good performance and not interfere with Amazon’s expiration requirements.

In your client’s case, I would experiment with W3 Total Cache’s garbage collection, expire intervals in both page and object caching to determine the optimal amount of time to retain a cached copy of a page in terms of both performance and Amazon’s URL expiration requirements. You can find the garbage collection settings under the “Advanced” section of the “Page Cache” settings and “Object Cache” settings for that plugin. You could always choose to specifically exclude the “Gents With No Cents” page of your client’s site from being cached using that same “Advanced” section of W3 Total Cache, but again that depends on how much of a performance hit would be acceptable on that page.

Hope that helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

James

Hi, Tim.

Thanks for using ScrapeAZon. I have not seen this behavior before, however I was able to reproduce it on your client’s site. I suspect you might be experiencing some sort of caching issue. Here’s why:

1. The first time I loaded your client’s page, I received an iframe URL that contained a date stamp of 2012-08-20 (look for the exp= parameter in the “scrapeazon-reviews” iframe src URL). If the date stamp in the URL is in the past at the time the URL is submitted to Amazon, Amazon will not return results to the iframe. They enforce the date/timestamp for several reasons laid out in the API terms of service.

2. The second time I loaded your client’s page, I received an iframe URL that contained an expiration date stamp of 2012-08-26 (tomorrow). Because the date/time stamp is in the future, Amazon returned content to the iframe.

I’d recommend looking into the caching configuration on your client’s site to ensure that the iframe URL ScrapeAZon produces is not being cached for an extended period of time.

Hope that helps. Let me know how it goes and if I can be of any further assistance. And thanks again for using ScrapeAZon.

james

Hi, Conq.

Thanks so much for notifying me about this problem. I have fixed it in version 1.0.3.

Also, I will keep your other suggested improvements (searching for reviews by post-id, etc.) in mind for implementation in future versions.

Best,

James

Hi, SequimPC.

Great! I’m glad you got it working. On the CSS, you can either include the style information using the shortcode, or you can edit your WordPress theme’s CSS file or add the CSS inline in your template files.

To use the shortcode, do the following:

[scrapeazon asin=”B001J4ZOAW” border=”false” width=”80″ height=”400″]

To do the same thing in CSS, look in the WordPress Themes folder, locate your theme, and then locate the “style.css” file.

Make a backup copy of the style.css file before you change anything, just in case.

Next, copy/paste the information below directly into that file. Then save the file and refresh your page. You might need to clear your browser’s cache to see the changes. Here’s the CSS (make sure you copy from the beginning dot all the way to the ending bracket:

.scrapeazon-reviews {
border: 0;
width: 80px;
height: 400px;
}

I should point out that this CSS might not remove the frame border from some versions of Internet Explorer.

Hope that helps!

James

No problem at all. I see the issue now. Try pasting the following shortcode in HTML mode:

[scrapeazon asin=”B001J4ZOAW”]

That should do it. The problem is you had pasted it with the < and > symbols surrounding the ASIN.

I can understand the confusion. I use the < and > symbols in the FAQ/usage to “contain” the “ASIN or 10-digit ISBN” language. They’re not meant to actually be included in the shortcode. I should probably change the FAQ to make that less confusing.

In any event, I tested [scrapeazon asin=”B001J4ZOAW”] in my own environment and received immediate results, so it should work for you as well.

Let me know if this solves the issue! If it doesn’t, I’ll take another stab at it.

Thanks.

James

Hi, SequimPC.

Do you know if you’re using any kind of caching that might be showing you an earlier version of your page? If you are, try clearing the cache (including in your browser) and see if that does it.

If it doesn’t, would you mind posting the shortcode you are attempting to use? That way I can test it on my end and see if I can reproduce the problem.

Thanks!

Hi, SequimPC.

Verify that you typed the shortcode in HTML mode in the WordPress editor, not VISUAL mode. If you typed the shortcode in VISUAL mode, characters such as quotation marks will have been converted to HTML escape codes and the shortcode will not function properly.

Thanks and let me know if I can be of further assistance.

James

Hi, Instisar.

Happy to help! Thank you for helping me pinpoint the bug.

If you’re good to go, please mark this ticket as resolved.

Thanks for using GoodReviews!

James