Miscellaneous Hacks - Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com

Version 2.1.4

Compatible with VB 3.7.x, VB 3.8.x, and VB 4.x.x.

Now compatible with Amazon.com, Amazon.uk and Amazon.de!

Every day Amazon has "daily deal" on one or more Amazon Kindle ebooks. This deal will usually reduce the price of an ebook to only $0.99 to $1.99, which is a signficant savings off the regular price.

Recently they started including a daily deal for kids or teens as well.

Amazon allows you to sign up for an email notice of the deal but they are notoriously unreliable. Amazon does NOT offer an official RSS feed of the daily deal either.

This mod will grab the info of each daily deal straight from Amazon and post it to your forum as either a new thread or a new post in an existing thread.

VB4 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Qapla.com Forum
VB3 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Joe's Ultimate Off Topic

You can completely customize how the post will read using an easy replacement system above.

This mod relies on Amazon providing consistent pages and data. In my testing it works the vast majority of the time. However there is no guarantee it will work all the time on every daily deal. I have done my best to always at least provide a link to the deal even if other info is unavailable but I can't guarantee it will always work.

This mod relies on a scheduled task to run daily. Amazon usually posts the deal by 12 AM Pacific Time. You may need to go to Admin CP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Scheduled Tasks Manager to set a more appropriate time for this task to run on your forum. (Sometimes they are late in posting the deal though so I suggest waiting until at least 2AM Pacific Time to run it. )


Affiliate ID: This mod provides the site Admin the option for providing their own Amazon affiliate ID. If no affiliate ID is provided, my affiliate ID will be used.

If you have viglinks or skimlinks installed on your forum be sure you have the option to overwrite amazon affiliate ids turned on- both companies offer this option.

If upgrading from a 1.x version it is strongly recommended you uninstall the old version first. If you do not you will need to manually edit the Post Content settings to the new value.

Please Mark as Installed if you use this.
Donations always appreciated.

[Arkham]

Originally Posted by Ramsesx

Cool stuff, thanks.
When do you expect the German version working?

(Heh! I just saw this mod and came in here to scope it out for you. No need to PM you the link now.

Good luck with the German one! Great idea.

Is there any other information that can be accessible, e.g. subject or genre? That would be ideal in order to not display irrelevant daily deals. Since the Author field is there, do you think a future version would allow a config to only match predefined authors?

[BirdOPrey5]

I suppose it is technically possible to filter by author but as a matter of being practical- I don't believe they repeat authors all that often... You'd literally be trying to guess at a handful from a pool of millions.

I suppose there could be an option that the title, author, and description fields were searched for keywords you specify, and if any of those were found, then it would post the deal- a lot like the RSS feed search works.

I will try and work that in but I probably won't delay a UK/German release to add that feature.

[scottct1]

This is great THANK YOU!

Any plans for a Free Amazon App of the Day version?

[BirdOPrey5]

Amazon App of The Day is best done via the RSS Feed: http://geekexile.com/amazon_rss.php

No need to re-invent the wheel, it will do basically the same as this.

[scottct1]

You could do that, but what I like about your mod is it posts everything in the same thread instead of creating a new thread every day.

Also the RSS feed does not seem to contain a link you can click on to get the app.

[BirdOPrey5]

I use this mod to make all posts in the same thread:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=261003

Example of how I use it on my forum:
http://www.juot.net/forums/showthrea...t=59771&page=3

So that gets it pretty close. Unless that RSS feed closes down I don't anticipate making one for the app deals.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to 1.03 to deal with when they (Amazon) use HTML tags inside multi-deal titles like they did today.

Like with the last update if you're not concerned about the version number all you need to do is upload the new php file in the /includes/cron/ directory.

However you can follow the full upgrade instructions to have your installed version number updated as well.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to Version 1.04
-Fixed the problem that showed up today with Amazon using a different image URL for today's deal.
-Pushed the default time back of the cron job about 2 hours. Amazon has been late posting the deal lately causing empty data to be collected.

It is recommended you run the full upgrade procedure.
(Upload an overwrite the php file AND import and overwrite = Yes the product xml file.)

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to 1.06-

Fixes a few changes Amazon has made over the last couple weeks, including this morning's change to the multi-book deal price.

Overwrite all files on upload and re-import xml product file, allow overwrite set to yes.

[scottct1]

Installed the new version and now its not filling in all the info.

Was working fine before. Here is what a post looks like now.

http://www.satelliteguys.us/chit-cha...ml#post2851241

Kindle Daily Deal for 04-30-2012

Title: After Midnight in the Garden of Good and EvilMarilyn Bardsley exposes the naked truth behind the death of Danny Hansford at the hands of his eccentric lover, the iconic Savannah, Georgia, socialite Jim Williams. It's a bizarre, page-turning look at the crime which inspired the best-selling novel and hit movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. By {AUTHOR}



About: Marilyn Bardsley exposes the naked truth behind the death of Danny Hansford at the hands of his eccentric lover, the iconic Savannah, Georgia, socialite Jim Williams. It's a bizarre, page-turning look at the crime which inspired the best-selling novel and hit movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

MSRP: {PRINTPRICE}
Amazon Regular Price: $2.99
Discount: -$2.00
Deal Price: $0.99 (Today Only - 04-30-2012)

Rated: {RATING} of 5 Stars

Buy It Now or Browse Amazon.com.

More...
{LONGDESC}

Language: {LANGUAGE}
# of Pages: {PAGES}
File Size: {FILESIZE}
Published by {PUBLISHER}, on {PUBDATE}.
ISBN Number: {ISBN}