eBook & Internet Publishing News
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Piranha Feed is our script for Amazon.com associates (affiliates) who wish to quickly integrate many automatically updating product links in their sites. Among other things, it allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site, and also allows to put product links (which update automatically) into your web pages, by specifying a product category (e.g. “books” or “software”) and a keyword. An example of the latter would be if you said “books” and “sudoku”, your page could always include the latest Sudoku books… always up to date… of course you could pick words/phrases not just for 1 page, but for dozens, hundreds, thousands, or more.

As mentioned previously, Amazon have made some changes that have necessitated an upgrade to Piranha too. Fortunately upgrading to the new version is very quick and simple for you (we’ve done the heavy lifting), and you also get new functionality - like the ability to search on a whole load of additional product types such as unboxed videos, sporting goods, and jewelry.

For Piranha Feed, we normally provide free access to upgrades for 90 days from the date of purchase. If you fall into this category, you can get the upgrade at http://www.scriptrocket.com/piranha/upgrade.php.

We have also decided to provide free access to the latest version of Piranha Feed, to any customer who purchased on or after 1st September 2007 - provided you contact us before 1 July 2008. To request the upgrade please write to webmaster@ebookcompiler.com including both your Amazon Associate ID, and your ClickBank receipt number.

As regular readers know, Piranha Feed is our PHP script intended for webmasters who are members of Amazon.com’s associate (affiliate) program. The script allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site, and also for webmasters to incorporate automatically updating lists of Amazon products within their sites. Check out the demo and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it does.

One of the nice things about Piranha Feed is that it only interfaces to Amazon using their documented programming interfaces (”APIs”) and thus doesn’t break when Amazon upgrade their site. Of course, if Amazon change their programming interfaces, an upgrade to Piranha Feed is necessary. This doesn’t happen frequently, but it can happen from time to time.

Just this situation has now arisen: Amazon have announced that they are phasing out ECS 3.0 (their older API) on March 31st 2008. This means that in order to continue to work, ECS 3.0 applications (including Piranha Feed) need to be modified to use the newer ECS 4.0 API.

We will shortly being releasing a new version of Piranha Feed that is compatible with ECS 4.0. I will make another post to this blog when it’s ready for download. And, I’m pleased to announce there will be some cool new features too!

Normally purchases of Piranha Feed include free access to any upgrades that we release for 90 days after the date of purchase. For this new version of Piranha Feed we will extend this - anybody who has purchased after September 1st 2007, will be able to get free upgrades to new versions through until the end of April 2008.

One other thing, the current price of Piranha Feed is US $39.95 (+VAT if you are in a European Union country). Even though we are adding some powerful and cool new features, I’m pleased to also announce that we’ll maintain that pricing for new customers through to May 1st 2008.

So look out for another blog posting coming soon, including

1. Migration instructions for the Piranha Feed upgrade
2. Details of new features in the Piranha Feed upgrade
3. How to get the best price for the new version

Derek Gehl of the Internet Marketing Center is giving away “Internet Millionaire’s Protege Bootcamp” DVDs, apparently normally priced at $297, for free (you only pay for shipping). The DVDs include 7 hours of professional business training.

As part of the deal, you also get free 30-day membership to his “Internet Entrepreneur Club” (if you continue with this after the 30 day trial you’ll be billed $97 per month). This includes includes a ‘live’ 60-minute tele-seminar with Derek each month, access to a private discussion forum where I’ll network with hundreds of other motivated online entrepreneurs, and the opportunity to ask unlimited questions of Derek’s personal team of Internet marketing specialists.

And, for an extra $2.95 (first month, it’s $17 per month if you decide to continue with it), you have the option to also get a subscription to “Secrets To Their Success” monthly online newsletter. If you choose this option, every month, you’ll get access to two detailed interviews with real people who are making $100,000… $250,000… $500,000… $1 million (or more!) with their own successful Internet businesses.

Hurry though, at the time of writing there are only 121 DVD packages left - and they’re expected to go fast!

Click here for more information

A few days ago, I I wrote about PopBox, a cool tool that allows you to make zoomable images on your web pages. The nice fellow who created PopBox, John S. Reid, saw my blog article and informed me of a little mistake.

I thought I was being clever by manually adding (using a graphics program) those borders round the thumbnail and zoomed-in versions of the images. Turns out that I wasn’t so clever after all - I was wasting my time - PopBox could have done it automatically for me. Oops!

We have completed our price review of the products at ScriptRocket.com - our web site which offers a range of flexible PHP scripts for webmasters. Some changes have already been implemented, but others will be going through shortly:-

• Polls - Create your own web polls - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Click/Counter Tracker - Invisibly count visitors to web pages or clicks on your advertising links - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Feedback Form - Email form to get feedback from your visitors - is now priced at US $14.95^*
• CBRocket - our flexible search engine and text link advertising solution for ClickBank affiliates, is still available at the old price for now - US $34.95^* - but the price will be rising on approximately the 23rd January. Pleas e purchase on January 23rd if you wish to get it at the current price!
• All other prices, are unchanged for now, though of course we do reserve the right to make further changes. It’s worth pointing out that the Essential Scripts - collection of scripts which includes containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form is now even better value than ever.

^* These prices don’t include VAT (Value Added Tax) which applies for European Union residents at their national rate.

ScriptRocket.com is our web site where we offer a number of powerful PHP scripts that you can use on your web site(s). These include:

• Piranha Feed - A script for quickly integrated automatically updated content from Amazon.com to your web pages. It also allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site. And all product links are tagged with your Amazon associate ID, allowing you to earn commissions from sales of these products.
• CBRocket - A ClickBank search engine for your site - it can also display context sensitive advertising links. With this script, the links are coded with your ClickBank nickname, allowing you to earn commissions from them.
• Top Site - start your own top sites list (other webmasters will send you traffic for free).
• Polls - Create your own web polls.
• Click/Counter Tracker - an invisible page counter and advertising tracking script.
• Feedback Form - Get feedback from your visitors
• Essential Scripts - A collection of scripts, at reduced price, containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form.

Anyway, while don’t often raise our prices, consider this post as advanced warning that we do intend to make some price rises on most, perhaps all, of the ScriptRocket products in the very near future. The new prices will should come into effect some time on Tuesday January 15th 2008^*. In short, if you want to purchase any of these products at the current (cheaper) prices, please do so on or before Monday January 14th 2008.

^* Although this is the planned day for the price changes, there are a few technical issues that we need to deal with… it’s there is a very small outside chance that the implementation of the changes may take slightly longer than we expect. Don’t bank on it though!

Happy New Year!

I’m already back at work, so let’s get down to it: I’ll begin the year with a quick plug for a wonderful, and free, tool for displaying image thumbnails. The tool is called “PopBox” and what it does is allow you to put thumbnail images in your web pages which when clicked, can expand, shrink, or stretch in various ways. The cool thing about PopBox is that it’s based around JavaScript (and a little CSS), so it’s easy to add to pretty much any web page - and you don’t need to mess around with Flash.

The tool is called PopBox, and it’s available from the following web site: http://www.c6software.com/Products/PopBox/

It’s worth checking out the site to see what it can do - and you’re probably already getting ideas for how you could use it. If you have a photogallery on your site - that’s one obvious application for starters. I’ve just added to our Guide to Muscle Gain (click on any one of the four little thumbnails of the pages, about half way down the page, just after the big image of the Table of Contents).

When you’re using PopBox, you don’t actually need to make up separate thumbnails for each image that you use it on. However, as with most things in life, a little extra effort can pay great dividends. On Guide to Muscle Gain, I actually spent a few minutes actually preparing the images and thumbnails for a better result:

(the grey background around the images below is not actually part of images, but was chosen just so you can see the edges of the images).

Step 1: Take a screenshot of the page Step 2: Scale down the screenshot image by 50% in both directions Step 3: Add a 2 pixel black border on all four sides of the image from step 1 (this becomes the zoomed in image) Step 4: Add a 2 pixel black border on all four sides of the image from step 2 (this becomes the thumbnail image)

According to the stats page in their resource area, we’ve been a member of the Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program since February of 2000. Really.

I can’t say we’ve earned a fortune with them - but we have had a few commission checks. To be fair, the limited earnings that we have had are all our own fault^* - we’ve focused on other things, and not really been active in promoting them - just the odd banner ad on some of our company’s lower traffic web sites.

In any case, we’ve now posted a review of the Internet Marketing Center affiliate program for anybody’s who’s interested.

^* I should mention that there is a certain person that I know, who unlike us has generated a nice regular income using the Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program. This person buys the products, writes reviews of the products, and then promotes those reviews at every conceivable opportunity. It wouldn’t be right for me to reveal the person’s name or website, but I can say that most of this person’s commissions are apparently earned from sales of the Internet Marketing Center’s flagship product, "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet".

Auction Buyers Guide is a free eBook about shopping at eBay and other Internet auctions. You can read it yourself, or give away to your customers, eBay auction winners, as a bonus with your product, etc., - I don’t care. The guide is brandable with your affiliate links, and you can also insert your business name and a link back to your web site. You earn money if a reader clicks one of the affiliate links and buys the linked product.

Click here for details

One of the best features of Activ E-Book Compiler is to create eBooks with all the menus, dialogs, etc., translated into a language of your choice. While you can do these translations yourself, several of our users have created translations and been kind enough to share them with other users. These include translations into Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Spanish Castellano. Gábor Kisfaludi who created a Hungarian translated, has just updated it with an improved version, and this is now available for download.

July 2nd 2007 - Gábor Kisfaludi has been a busy bee - and provided a further update to the Hungarian translation. It’s now available at the usual place.