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

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!

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.

As you probably know, CoverFactory is our program for creating 3D-style eBook cover images (and images of software boxes, membership cards, CD-ROMs, floppy disks, zip disks, etc….). I’ve already written recently about some improvements that we’ve made to the CoverFactory.com web site so that site better reflects what the software can do. I have some additional news: today, we have released a new version, version 2.50 of CoverFactory.

If you’re an existing customer, you can upgrade to the new version free of charge: instructions are on the download page. And, if you’ve not purchased CoverFactory, why not download the free trial version and try the program out for yourself.

The most important changes in the new version are enhancements to usability. These changes are intended to make it easier for a novice user to produce a high quality cover image. The changes include enabling the Enhanced detail and Soften Edges functions by default (which both can help to produce a better final image). We’ve also made the default cover size larger, and we’ve started off the Background, Render and Layout tabs at 100% zoom.

Additionally, there are also improvements in the quality of the rendered images, the Help instructions, and in the user interface of the program. The user interface improvements include making the font preview larger and much easier to see.

Anyway, why not download it and you can see yourself. I think you’ll like the new version.

CoverFactory is our company’s software for making 3D images of eBook Covers, Software Boxes, Membership cards, etc. It’s evolved into very powerful software, and it’s way cheaper than the competition, but I recently realized that we were underselling it. And by "underselling it, I don’t mean that we want to raise the price!

The problem was that CoverFactory has improved with time, and got substantially better. However, despite several releases of the program, the example images on the web site, hadn’t been updated. As a result, the examples didn’t fairly reflect the capabilities of the program.

The CoverFactory home page and the gallery of sample eBook Covers on the site have now both been updated. I think that they now give a fairer reflection of what the program is capable of, even in an ordinary mortal’s hands (Sunil: all the images were created by me - and I am absolutely not a computer artist).

I thought it was worth describing the procedure that was used to improve the images, so here it is, step-by-step:

1. I had saved all the old cover projects made with a much earlier version of the program, so I could of course simply load them in using Open… on the File menu. Some of my projects were in fact so old (made using 2.00) that recreating the background (see this tip) helped. In my case, I couldn’t quite remember which projects these were, so I simply recreated the background on all my projects.
2. The default size that CoverFactory renders covers at, is 200X200 pixels. That is actually pretty small on modern screens (we may increase the default in a future version), and if you really want to see the detail of the final image, you’ll probably want to render the cover bigger than that. You can do this by going to the Background tab, double clicking where it says Image, and then changing the size on the second page of the wizard that is displayed. The examples at the top of the CoverFactory.com home page are 200X200 and 300X300 pixels. The bigger examples (halfway down and at the bottom of the home page) are 615X615 pixels.
3. This next point does not actually affect the quality of your final cover, but it is nevertheless important. The Render tab in CoverFactory, by default, displays the final cover zoomed in to fit the available screen area. As on most computers, the screen area is larger than the cover image that is being rendered, the image is zoomed in (enlarged), which can be deceptive - it can make it appear as if your final cover is going to be chunky and pixelated. On the Render tab click the 100% toolbar button (or View menu, then Zoom sub option, and finally 100%) to see your cover as it really is.
4. When we wrote CoverFactory, even though we put a lot of effort into optimizing the rendering process, it could still take a couple of minutes for larger more complex images. Therefore, we provided options to control the trade-off between quality and speed. Of course, since then, the average desktop computer has become substantially faster. which means that you’ll probably find CoverFactory’s rendering is fast enough even when set to its highest quality. To get the top quality do this:
   • On the Render tab under Rendering Options, double click on Detail and set it to Enhanced.
   • Also on the Render tab under Rendering Options, double click on Soften Edges and set it to Yes.
5. If you’ve read the tips on the CoverFactory web site, you’ll already know from this tip that enabling Folds Shown (under Object Properties in the Render tab) works best if Soften Edges is also enabled. In our sample images, we did indeed use this combination on some images - we found they they worked best for us when we choose a Folds Color that was subtlely different from the other colors around it in the cover, rather than something that stuck out like a sore thumb.

That’s it for now - do check out the new CoverFactory.com, and if you haven’t already purchased it, why not download the free trial version of CoverFactory.

CBRocket is our PHP script that allows webmasters to allow their visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. A new release, version 2.10, fixes the limitation that had recently appeared, and which I wrote about in a recent blog post. As well as fixing this limitation, we’ve taken the opportunity to add a neat new filter feature, which is explained below. If you want to upgrade to the new version, we’ll provide it free to existing customers - so please contact us including the receipt number of your original purchase.

CBRocket: Filtering the ClickBank marketplace

CBRocket also now includes a feature that allows you to filter out product listings from ClickBank’s results, based on keywords that you specify.

Why would you want to do that?

Although ClickBank contains many excellent products, there may be some products that you feel are inappropriate for your site.

For example:

• There might be some products that you consider unsuitable for your audience. For example, in site that is principally aimed at families,
  you might not wish to list products relating to nude photography, or improving your casino and gambling skills.

• Many affiliate programs and advertising programs have restrictions on what type of content may appear on the same site as their ads. For
  example, you may not be allowed to put gambling ads on your web site. For this reason, you wouldn’t want CBRocket to display ClickBank products
  related to gambling, betting, casinos, poker, roulette, etc.

So how does this feature work?

First you set up a list of keywords describing products that you wish to filter out. And, from then on, whenever you retrieve the last ClickBank
data (by clicking a link in the admin screen of CBRocket), any products which contain any of these keywords will be automatically removed from your copy of the ClickBank marketplace.

Example: if you set this parameter to "casino,roulette,poker,horse racing,bet,bets,betting,gambling" it would filter out any ClickBank products which contained any of these gambling terms in their title or description.

If you ever want to narrow or widen the criteria, you can simply change the list of keywords, and click the retrieval link (in the CBRocket admin
screen) to update your copy of the ClickBank marketplace. It really is that easy.

CBRocket is our PHP script that lets your web site visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. And all the links to the various ClickBank products, in both cases, are tagged with your clickbank affiliate ID, allowing you to earn commissions on sales.

A customer wrote to me recently with a limitation that has just arisen (because of recent changes at ClickBank’s site), and my testing has now confirmed it. When you log-in and ask CBRocket to retrieve the latest Clickbank marketplace data, CBRocket seems to only be retrieving the first 100 listings from each subcategory (subcategories are things like “Marketing -> Promotion”). This sounds like perhaps CBRocket may be leaving out a significant chunk of the ClickBank marketplace - but as always with computers - things are never quite as simple as they first seem.

• When I just tried CBRocket on the marketplace, it did retrieve 5729 unique items, plus a further 1916 duplicates. I don’t yet know the number that should have been retrieved, but it does not sound like a vast number of items have gone missing.
• Many subcategories contain less than 100 items - items in these subcategories won’t be affected at all.
• For those subcategories which contain over 100 items, items 101 onwards are often duplicated in other subcategories which do contain less than 100 items. So, these types of items also won’t be "lost" either.

By "lost", I mean that CBRocket is not retrieving these items from the ClickBank marketplace to its database, and hence these items won’t be displayed in ads or search results (although of course other items would be). At this exact moment, I can’t say that no items are being "lost", but neither can I yet say that any items are actually being "lost". I simply don’t know yet - although my gut tells me that the chances are, a few items are being "lost".

Anyway, I’ve examined the problem, and it should be fairly straightforward to fix. We expect to have an update to CBRocket within a week or so. Check here for updates, and don’t be afraid to email us if you have any questions.

Update:

I’ve done some more testing. It does seem a fair number of lower ranked items are affected - I guess the ClickBank marketplace had grown even faster than I realized. According to my data, there are now 8365 unique items in the marketplace, plus a further 3641 duplicates - which means that 2636 lower ranked items are currently not being retrieved. This would correspond to items which rank below 100 in all the subcategories in which they are listed.

Anyway, the good news, is the planned fix appears to work fine - so we should hopefully (fingers crossed) being able to release a fix within 1 week, and perhaps a bit sooner.