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.

[inphoenix]

Originally Posted by 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.

This RSS feed does not allow to add our affiliate tag to the download link. Your Kindle daily deal mod allows that. If you can create a similar mod for the app of the day (and allow to add our affiliate tag) that would be awesome!!

[tareqbd]

Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5

Fatal error: Call to a member function escape_string() on a non-object in /home/***********/public_html/dbtech/credits/credits_core.php on line 640

When I try to run "Cron Job" above error comes. Please fix.

[tareqbd]

Originally Posted by tareqbd

Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5

Fatal error: Call to a member function escape_string() on a non-object in /home/***********/public_html/dbtech/credits/credits_core.php on line 640

When I try to run "Cron Job" above error comes. Please fix.

Bump!

[BirdOPrey5]

It's a problem from dbtech's credits mod, not this one.

[ATN]

Hi, fantastic idea for a mod, but I'm having a problem with actually populating the post.

The post is being generated, and I've changed the template to the suggested UK style (I'm using amazon.co.uk

I've also tried pulling from the US site and get no info from there either.

I'm getting the following on the actual post;

Kindle Daily Deal for 29-04-2013

Kindle Daily Deal



about:

Deal Price: ?. (Today Only) (% Off)

Deal # 2

Other Daily Deal



about:

Deal Price: ?. (Today Only) (% Off)


View All Deals Now or Browse Amazon.uk.

[ATN]

Any pointers as to what it is I'm missing?

[jpbryan]

I am having a similar problem as ATN (above)..

Please see screen shots and tell me what I have done wrong..

Thanks for the mod and your help...

[ATN]

Still looking for any pointers that anyone can give me on this add-on.

Thanks

[BirdOPrey5]

I can't tell much from the screenshots and explanations - jpbryan I can see you have BBCode in your subject//title, that won't work but it shouldn't be breaking anything else.

I confirmed it is still working on my 2 forums without issue so not sure why it wouldn't be picking up.

If you want to PM me admin access to your forums I will take a look but I can't promise how quickly that will happen.

[ATN]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I can't tell much from the screenshots and explanations - jpbryan I can see you have BBCode in your subject//title, that won't work but it shouldn't be breaking anything else.

I confirmed it is still working on my 2 forums without issue so not sure why it wouldn't be picking up.

If you want to PM me admin access to your forums I will take a look but I can't promise how quickly that will happen.

I know it's something I'm doing, I saw how well it works on your page

I'll sort out the access tonight and PM it over to you later.