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.

[pelican]

is it possible to somehow modify it so that i can put it in one of the ad location instead of posting it.

[BirdOPrey5]

I wouldn't call it modified at that point, it would basically be at least 50% new code.

You could use the code that scrapes the info from the pages but after that I would imagine instead of using the vBulletin functions to create a new post you'd need to write a custom .html file and then use that as an <iframe> ad in an ad location template.

It's not a bad idea... Never thought of using them in an ad. I'm not sure when I would get a chance to work on it though, will definitely post back if/when I add the option.

What size ad were you considering?

[Toorak Times]

Does it work for aus BOP?

[BirdOPrey5]

I could only find daily deals for US, GB, and DE. If you know the link for an Australian daily deal please post it here and I'll try to add it.

[cykelmyggen]

Hi
This mod stopped working sometime in 2012 and I tried to make it work at that time with no succes. I would like to have this working on my new design, so I tried to uninstall/install the mod and run the cron job manually. The message from the cron job is that it ran succesfully, but no posts are showing in the assigned forum.
Any help would be appreciated.
http://www.bookeater.dk/vbforum/kindle-daily-deal/

[BirdOPrey5]

Which amazon site are you pulling from? It's actually still working for me, puling from amazon.com. There is a little HTML code displayed but generally it works.

[cykelmyggen]

I'm using Amazon.com as well.

[BirdOPrey5]

I just installed this on a VB4 test site, virtually stock, and it works- at least when I run the cron job manually from the mod settings- if you run it manually from the settings page does it work for you?

I'm using this as the code for the post template:

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) 

[B][SIZE=3]Other Deal[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{ALT_TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

[URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL]

[B]About:[/B] {ALT_SHORTDESC}

[B]Deal Price: {ALT_DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) 


[B][URL="{LINK}"]View More Deals Now[/URL][/B] or [URL="{ALINK}"]Browse Amazon.com[/URL].

Also - What PHP version is on your server?

[cykelmyggen]

Using PHP Version 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.13

Code for template:

*Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}*

*{TITLE} (http://{LINK})*

[IMG]{SMALLIMG}[/IMG] (http://{LINK})

*about_:* {SHORTDESC}

*Deal Price: {DEALPRICE}* (Today Only)

*Other Deal*

*{ALT_TITLE} (http://{LINK})*

[IMG]{ALT_SMALLIMG}[/IMG] (http://{LINK})

*about_:* {ALT_SHORTDESC}

*Deal Price: {ALT_DEALPRICE}* (Today Only)


*View More Deals Now (http://{LINK})* or Browse Amazon.com (http://{ALINK}).

[cykelmyggen]

Tried your template and gets the same message:

Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5


Go Back

DEBUG INFO-------------------

Daily Deal URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000677541

VB Version >= 4.1.4 (4.2.2)

VB Version >= 4.1.4 (4.2.2)
Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/?tag=wwwboggnasker-20
Big Img URL: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51h91cFSI7L.jpg
Small Img URL: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51h91cFSI7L._SL110.jpg
Title: The Kindle Daily Deal
Deal URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000677541&tag=wwwboggnasker-20
Percent Off: %
Today's Price: 
Date: 20th October 2014
Final Title: Kindle Daily Deal for 20th October 2014The Kindle Daily DealAbout: by Jan-Philipp Sendker Customer review: "If you are an Amy Tan fan or you enjoyed The Bridges of Madison County or Memoirs of a Geisha, then you will love this book! So powerful and moving, it will touch your heart."Deal Price:  (Today Only) (% Off)View Deals Now or Browse Amazon.com.

New Post Successful!

F?rdig

However the post doesn't show up at the selected forum