value “” is out of range. (10008)

Quite a few people have been getting this error (though not me, so far) and I am at a bit of a loss to explain it. There is no decent documentation on the feed from eBay so I fear there is no easy way to find out what is going on. At the moment I am inclined to blame eBay as I have seen the error happening with other plugins too (I think I happened on a phpBay site with the issue), but it could be some weird combination of the choice of keywords, category or even hosting server causing the problem - seems to happen consistently only to some people. It’s really annoying, of course, and I will make it a priority to find a workaround for this before adding any new bells and whistles to WordBay.

Posted on November 21st, 2008 by markowe
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Go and get the new version of WordBay, v0.998 (oh, so close!) The following issues have been resolved and functionality added:

- geotargetting timeout errors resolved (we hope). Thanks to Jez for this solution. The problem before was that users were reporting occasional timeouts when geotargetting was switched on and the HostIP server happened to be working sluggishly (not that common, but still…) But now, hopefully, if the HostIP server takes longer than 2 seconds to respond (should be long enough) then WordBay will just revert to the default country, rather than hang up or produce an error. Let us know if it is working, because HostIP has been working fine, so we haven’t been able to test it.

- nice “mouse-over” effects added. A user requested this and it was pretty easy to implement so thought I would add it. Now in the back-end, under Display options, you can choose to have the whole background of an item change colour when you move the mouse over it, and change back when you move off it. This will only work if you specify both a “Mouse not over” and a “Mouse over” colour. Additionally, you should make sure that the “Mouse not over” colour is the same as that specified in your CSS file for .firstlocaleitem background-color, otherwise when you move over it will change colour and then change back to a different colour than what it was, which you don’t want, I imagine.

- buy.php can be relocated and renamed. This was something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and since a user mentioned it again recently I thought it was high time. In Display options you can now specify the exact path to your buy.php file and change its location, as well as its name. So for example, you could move it to the root of your domain and call it shop.php. In that case, you will specify the full path as: http://mydomain.com/shop.php. Makes it look neater than: mydomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wordbay/buy.php and there may be a footprint issue too, where search engines start spotting the “buy.php” pattern, though that’s getting a bit paranoid in my opinion! Just remember to use the full path as I have demonstrated above. If you leave the field empty then it will continue to use the buy.php file located in your plugins/wordbay directory. One concern with this is if we ever change anything in the buy.php file (not planning to, but who knows…) then you will need to remember to copy the new one to where you have moved it.

Well, I am sure you will be only-too-prepared to let me know if anything is awry with this version Keep on earning with EPN, won’t you!

Posted on November 17th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

The geo-targetting version of WordBay has been around for a few weeks now, so I just wondered how this is performing for you, if you are using it.

To be honest I have so far only had one sale where I could definitely put it down to the geo-targetting doing its work - a UK sale on a page I know defaults to US - but the vast majority of my search traffic is from the US anyway, so I think it’s more to do with that. Still, it would be cool to get a sale or two from Hong Kong or Spain just so I knew it was worth it!

Let me know how you are doing!

Posted on October 9th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Apologies to all those who were hoping to use WordBay with US eBay (now why would you want to do that?) - a little omission in this new version caused the US Site ID option not to appear in the drop-down list! Rather inconvenient. I have now corrected this, but have NOT advanced the version number - so you should just redownload the plugin, and just overwrite the WordBay.php file with this new version.

Sorry about that - getting my head around the country options has been something of a trial… Keep any bug reports coming in!

Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

I am currently working on making WordBay fully consistent with the different language and country options available through the eBay Partner Network, which it may not have been before. I was as confused as anybody, but I think I have unravelled most of the threads, and can present an explanation of eBay country sites as related to the EPN program, and its use with WordBay - please note though that I will implement the full range of country options in versions post-v0.99.

These are the sites available through the EPN program, and I believe that on application to EPN you would normally tick all of these countries, though I don’t know if it is possible to be accepted for some but rejected for others:

United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, eBay Motors (the latter functions a bit like a country site but is not applied for separately)

These are all fully-functioning (I hope!) in the WordBay options.

Non-EPN eBay sites

However, there are other international eBay sites which are NOT accessible through EPN. So you will not earn any commissions with them if you choose them as options. These eBay sites are also divided into two groups which I’ll explain in a second:

Group 1: Germany, China, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland

Group 2: Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, Poland, Sweden

Of these, it is possible that even though you can choose one of these as your default listings site in WordBay, you actually won’t be served any listings. I cannot be sure which these are - I have not managed to get China and Taiwan to work, for example, I don’t even know if they are fully-fledged eBay sites, I include all of these for the sake of completeness and we may remove them at a later date for reasons explained below. These non-EPN countries are shown in brackets in the drop-down option lists in WordBay (in post v0.99 versions).

In addition, Group 2 sites do not even have a so-called “Placement ID” (which I’ve called “referral locale” in WordBay) with which to refer the user to the relevant site, so I have not included these in the referral locale drop-down list in WordBay admin.

Country sites and geotargetting

There is one corollary of this if you are using the geotargetting option in WordBay - have you spotted it?

If you have geo-targetting switched on and you get a visitor coming from a country with a non-EPN site, like Sweden, say, they will be served Swedish eBay listings, but you will not receive any commissions for sales made by eBay. However, this is a small price to pay - do we really hope that a Swedish visitor will go and join US eBay and start buying from there if only we were to serve them US eBay listings? Not worth the worry in my opinion. Unless you REALLY resent eBay earning any money from you without paying you a commission!

More seriously, if someone is visiting from China, or one of the other eBay locations that do not seem to provide a product feed, well… they’ll get an empty page, for now. Again, are you that bothered about this? If so, I will try to think of some way to get around this in future versions, probably simply by eliminating those countries, once we have identified them. If you want to do remove any countries yourself - easy, just delete the rows pertaining to those countries in the countries.txt file that comes with WordBay. Then when a visitor comes from those countries they will simply receive listings from the default country.

I hope that goes some way to clearing things up if you were confused about this, and I would be happy to hear any more insights into this issue!

Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »