17 Responses to “About WordBay”

1. WordBay » First BETA version of WordBay released!, on April 11th, 2008 at 4:05 am Said:

   […] PagesAbout WordBay […]

2. Bo, on July 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am Said:

   Maybe something to do with .info domains?

3. admin, on July 11th, 2008 at 11:56 am Said:

   Hi, I guess you meant to post this under my post about eBay sites being sandboxed! So I copied it to there.

4. Julie, on August 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm Said:

   I love your plugin thanks for your dedication to finding a solution.

   I am wondering what I am doing wrong, when I validate my site, I get over 300 errors they all seem to be due to the ebay fee. I am including an example. Any idea how I can fix this?

   # Info Line 130, Column 9471: start tag was here.

   …002 NISSAN PATHFINDER LIKE NEW!!!’>Nissan : Maxima GLE 20

   ✉

   If you meant to include an entity that starts with “&”, then you should terminate it with “;”. Another reason for this error message is that you inadvertently created an entity by failing to escape an “&” character just before this text.
   # Warning Line 130, Column 10150: reference to external entity in attribute value.

   …TUyUzQUIlM0FTUkNIJTNBVVMlM0ExMDE=&buy=buy&cheap=cheap’>Nissan : Maxima GLE 20

   ✉

   This is generally the sign of an ampersand that was not properly escaped for inclusion in an attribute, in a href for example. You will need to escape all instances of ‘&’ into ‘&’.
   # Error Line 130, Column 10150: reference to entity “buy” for which no system identifier could be generated.

   …TUyUzQUIlM0FTUkNIJTNBVVMlM0ExMDE=&buy=buy&cheap=cheap’>Nissan : Maxima GLE 20

   ✉

   This is usually a cascading error caused by a an undefined entity reference or use of an

5. admin, on September 2nd, 2008 at 2:51 am Said:

   Hi Julie, sorry for not responding earlier.

   Oh boy, don’t touch me at a sore point! There is no way your site will validate while using WordBay - there is lots of ugly stuff in there that needs sorting out. However, even if I manage to ensure valid HTML for the plugin code that I am responsible for, the actual eBay RSS feed itself does not validate, and that would be a lot more difficult to correct.

   So, sorry, I do have an item on my “to-do” list to clear up the HTML, but I hope it’s not too important to you - I can’t see myself doing it in the very near future. Remember, MOST major sites out there are nowhere near valid - if it’s any consolation…

6. Taco, on October 9th, 2008 at 8:33 pm Said:

   Thanks for the great plugin. It’s the best! I plan to build a niche store site using your plugin.

7. markowe, on October 10th, 2008 at 12:19 am Said:

   Glad you find it useful! And remember with the niche store - content is king! It’s all too easy to populate a whole site with pages of product listings with very little content, but Google won’t like it. Better to go very slowly and create more content than product listings and enjoy more sales in the long term…

8. ChuckMcB, on October 17th, 2008 at 9:33 am Said:

   I’ve got a suspicion that “Location for dispatch of items” (or my understanding of it) is not working correctly.

   I have a UK based site, if I set all the options to the UK and turn Geo-target off all the items displayed are based in the US. (the price displays in UK£ but when you click on the actual item it takes you to a page on ebay.co.uk that show the item is indeed dispatched from the US)

   By setting the “Location for dispatch of items” to the UK I was hoping that *only* UK based sellers would be included. Am I confused?

   Here’s an example page, Geo-target is off and all the options are set to UK. (remove the ***s to view)

   http://www.arabic***keyboard.co.uk/pc-usb-keyboards

9. markowe, on October 17th, 2008 at 9:48 am Said:

   Hi Chuck,

   Thanks for letting me know about this. Yes indeed only UK sellers should be listed when you select “Location for dispatch…”. I am wondering if this is related to the problem Jez just flagged up today here: http://www.itsgottabered.com/wordbay/2008/how-is-geo-targetting-for-you/#comments (his last comment). However, this is related to geotargetting, since the back-end option may currently be overriding the geo-targetted country, but you say you are getting this problem with geo-targetting OFF?

   I will have to have a look asap and let you know what I come up with. Unfortunately I am not around this weekend to work on this, but will try to fix early next week.

10. Jez, on October 17th, 2008 at 3:13 pm Said:

    I am not sure if this is the same issue or not at the moment… it could well be.

    Here is a UK proxy, it is slow but it will let you test it:

    http://www.docoja.com/blue/

    What Chuck says is correct… items show in ££ and redirects are sent to ebay.co.uk but items are shipped from the US, and are priced in $$ on ebay.

    This is not the case with my original mod… not sure if you still have the code for that?

    I think I would start by looking at countries.txt …

    Jez

11. Jez, on October 17th, 2008 at 4:02 pm Said:

    Think ive got it…

    The problem is a mis match between Referral locale and eBay Site ID

    My original text file had less values. When new values were added for all parameters you can see they changed, so you can see the fifth value across on the two lines below are 3 and 1 respectively, and it is actually the 5th and 7th values that match (3) below…

    United Kingdom|UK|3|710-53481-19255-0|3
    United Kingdom|UK|3|710-53481-19255-0|1|0|3|

    In short… you inserted two more values into the text array, but the code was still reading in the original value of 4 (arrays start a 0 ):

    $first_location = $locals[$i][4];

    whereas, now you have inserted more values it should be 6:

    $first_location = $locals[$i][6];

    Full block:

    for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($locals); $i++){
    if ($userCountry == $locals[$i][1]){
    $first_siteID = $locals[$i][2];
    $first_placementID = $locals[$i][3];
    $first_location = $locals[$i][6];
    break;
    }
    }

12. markowe, on October 20th, 2008 at 5:32 am Said:

    Yikes! Thanks Jez! Dunno how I missed that, I remember having a little bit of trouble with getting my head around those arrays (for some reason my brain just doesn’t work in 2 dimensions) but thought I’d sorted that.

    OK, I have fixed this now and one or two other things - will write up on the homepage in a bit, but the new version 0.997 should be available from the download page.

13. ChuckMcB, on October 20th, 2008 at 3:54 pm Said:

    erm…think I’ve found another bugette

    Imagine a page with:

    [wordbay]shoes[/wordbay]

    [wordbay]socks[/wordbay]

    When you view the page the shoes boxes are shown twice and the socks boxes not at all.

    example: http://www.arabic***keyboard.co.uk/test-woo-hoo remove *** to view.

14. markowe, on October 21st, 2008 at 1:59 am Said:

    Hi Chuck,

    Thanks for the info! I would call this more of a quirk! WordBay currently does not support multiple [wordbay] tags in one post. So what’s happening here is that it is taking the keywords from the first one and then sticking the same content in between both tags. I never thought of that side-effect though!

    Some day in the distant future I will adapt WordBay so you CAN put multiple listings on one page. Actually, that would be more useful probably for people who are using WordBay like I am here: http://www.mtbserbia.com/2008/uzice-to-durmitor-august-trek-summary/ - on my mountain-biking blog, to insert individual items (see the Garmin GPS ad halfway down). However, I haven’t had anyone asking for this functionality yet.

    The quirk you have mentioned… hmmm, to be honest I don’t think I will bother fixing it, it would actually be quite a bit of hassle, I don’t think it’s doing any harm

15. ChuckMcB, on October 21st, 2008 at 9:11 am Said:

    Thanks for the replies.

    Jez: Yes, I’m using the advance filtering already.

    Mark: I was hoping that an array needed reset to loop through the next block, but WP is never that simple

    I was planning to do something similar to your mountain-biking blog: have a bit of text, one eBay listing, bit more text and another eBay listing.

    It would be nice to have but it’s not a stopper. I can always use phpBay Lite to display the second block.

16. markowe, on October 23rd, 2008 at 2:30 am Said:

    Chuck - actually, WP DOES reset everything in the next recursion of the “The Loop”, meaning in Earth-speak that you CAN have multiple posts on the same page (usually the homepage) with different listings. You just can’t have more than one tag in the SAME block of content. This would require a multi-dimensional array to store all the different keywords and then loop through creating however many listings were needed. This might be accomplished with half an hour of coding, but then again might take a day or two before I ironed out any unforeseen bugs that may arise (and they usually do, that’s why we call them unforeseen).

    But I will definitely consider it, not least because I could “market” it as an effective alternative to something like Auction Ads - except this would actually WORK because it doesn’t get the results from a cache which is invariably outdated, which is why I gave up on Auction Ads.

17. Must have Wordpress Plugins | DomainProtégé.com, on November 9th, 2008 at 11:52 pm Said:

    […] in One SEO Pack Google Sitemap Generator WordBay Advertising plugin for eBay Enhanced WordPress Contact Form Redirection    Posted […]

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