I was contacted by a chap from The Nile to let me know that they not only have an Affiliate program I could join, but they have an API to access their site! I’ve spent the last couple of days adding the affiliate links. You’ll see that several stores now appear to link to clixGalore — but fear not, the links will still get you to the page you’re after.
You’ll also notice there’s now a new store to search — The Nile. It’s the fastest of the search engines by a considerable margin. ( Which isn’t really fair — at least one of the sites which is searched is just a fancy screen scraper.)
Additionally, I’ve cleaned up the CSS and layout some. Hopefully you won’t have the horizontal scroll bar on your browser, regardless of how wide you open the window.
You’ll also notice that there’s a context sensitive help message in the top right-hand corner. This should make it clear what you can do at which ever page you happen to be on.
Try out the updated Booko and let me know what you think.
EDIT: Added a tool tip style mouse over for the Most Popular/Recent list so you can see the full title. Thanks to Niall & Riina for their help & ideas.
I added fragment caching to Booko the other day. I’ve added caching to four sections, the Recent Searchs, Most Popular, Shopping Cart and the section which displays the prices of a book.
Now, instead of calculating the most popular books every time someone views a page, we look to see if that part of the site has been created recently — if it has, use it again. The Shopping cart is another good example — it only changes when you add or remove a book from it. Now Booko avoids having to calculate the cost of your shopping trolley at all shops every time you view a page — it regenerates that part of the page only when you add or remove a book.
Kinda wishing I’d bench marked it before and after. I think it’s faster now — but that’s because I’m looking for it. It feels snappier. Anyway — let me know what you think, faster or slower?
I’ve updated Booko’s cart feature. You now get a link to Amazon ( com or co.uk ) which will prompt you to add multiple items to your Amazon cart and set me as the Associate. Should make buying a bunch of items way easier. Now I just need to figure out how to do the same thing with Fishpond.
Also, fixed a bug with a shop’s scrapping code.
Interesting article about book prices in Australia. Basically, we’re being screwed over by the Brits.
Well, my first attempt at a shopping cart was pretty naf. There was no feedback to tell you that something was happening when adding or removing books from your cart, and every book added was listed individually.
I’ve added some feedback now for adding and removing from your cart, and added the number of items beside each item. It’s quite a bit better. Still looks crap tho.
Well, I’ve added another feature. You can now add books to a cart, which will calculate the price to buy all books in your cart at the various online book stores, including calculating shipping.
It might be slightly problematic for collecting referrer fees as people will probably not be clicking on each of the book links. I’ll have to have a think on that.
Next job is to make it look better.
I’ve just finished the biggest update to Booko since it went live. I never liked the fact that you had to wait for all the results to be found before displaying prices. Having each shop get updated was problematic as the end result wasn’t sorted by price. So I found a way to provide feedback while book sites are being searched and having the result sorted by price.
I’ve found a fixed a few bugs from the last release too around providing a link for the image in the search page.
So, go to town and let me know if you find any bugs. Any feature requests while I’m at it? I’m thinking of a personal list of viewed books or maybe a shopping cart type feature which calculates the cheapest place to buy all the books on your list – inclusive of shipping.
Well, it’s been a while, but it looks like someone (Tim you’re the only person who looks at cooking books) found a bug. Searching for a book which has an ISBN which is only available via Fishpond and not Amazon, means that you could find the book, but that it didn’t have a title, author or image. Well, I’ve fixed that now.
Also, you can now click on the book cover image to take you to the price lookup page.
Lastly, shipping price can now be more than just a single number – I can define rules for shipping. So, for example ( the only one I’ve found so far ) Fishpond have free shipping for books over $50 – this is now correctly accounted for.
I’ve updated Booko to have a default new search engine: fishpond.com.au. Thanks to Tim Evans for finding bugs in it immediately.
Unlike Amazon, Fishpond ( or any Australian bookstore as far as I can tell ) don’t provide an interface for searching their site. Fishpond take the inconvenience one step further by not providing a standard way of finding a book by ISBN. You have to search for the ISBN, then get the Fishpond ID of the book. ( BTW — searching for an ISBN can return multiple results — the same book, but often with different prices. Apparently it’s due to having multiple suppliers for the same book. ) Aside from these annoying bits, Fishpond seems to have a very complete listing. They have an associate program too, so sending traffic to their sites may provide some return.
So, I wrote a searching module for Fishpond. Let me know if you find bugs.
