01 Sep 06 Making Your Amazon AStore Search Engine Friendly
Amazon just recently released a new beta tool for their associates (affiliates). It’s called Amazon AStore.
It allows you to build your own customizable store. This is what a store looks like: http://astore.amazon.com/bristolwebdes-20
The things I like about it are:
- It’s simple and easy to set up. Mine took less than 5 minutes.
- It allows you to feature products on the homepage and add your own descriptions to them.
- You can add your own logo and customize the color scheme.
Unfortunately, one of the first things you’ll notice is where the store is located. It is hosted on Amazon’s servers. To use or promote the store you are stuck with three options.
These descriptions are taken directly from Amazon’s page:
|
Link to your aStore as a stand-alone site Make your aStore a stand-alone section of your Web site by adding a “Store” link to your main site navigation bar that links directly to your new store. This is the easiest way to integrate your aStore; however, it will appear to your users as if they are leaving your website when visiting your store. |
 |
|
Embed your aStore using an inline frame An inline frame is a great way to embed your aStore into any existing or new page on your Web site. This method of embedding your aStore will appear to your visitors as if the aStore is part of your site and enable them to shop without leaving your site. |
|
| Integrate your aStore using a frameset Frame your aStore into your Web site using a frameset by placing your aStore in one frame and your Web site’s navigation in another frame. This method of embeding your store will also be appear to your visitors as if the store is part of your Web site and enable them to shop without leaving your site. |
 |
You’ll notice that none of the options are search engine friendly. Search engines treat frames and iframes as links, simply following them rather than thinking of it as part of your site. If it were possible to make it part of your site, it would allow you to rank your Amazon category and product detail pages in the search engines separately.
I’ve recently come up with a solution whereby you can have your AStore hosted on your own domain and fully indexable by the search engines. Here is my first store:
Would you be interested in this solution?
How important is it to be able to customize the headers and footers (outside of the customization allowed by Amazon)?
If enough people are interested, I’ll make it available for download.
24 Mar 06 Regular Expression Search Engine
Wow! This is a great site: RegExLib (Regular Expression Library)
Excuse my exuberance, but I’ve been creating a lot of long regular expressions from scratch lately and it’s time consuming! This is a great resource for anyone wanting to use regular expressions in their code.
23 Dec 05 SQL Programming Excuses
If you need a good erudite excuse: http://www.red-gate.com/excusegenerator/Excuses.aspx
21 Dec 05 Logging Client Side JavaScript Errors to the Server – The Code Project – AJAX / Atlas
This is a brilliant idea. Take a look:
Logging Client Side JavaScript Errors to the Server – The Code Project – AJAX / Atlas
14 Dec 05 WordPress Permalinks with Custom 404 Page
As I mentioned in a previous post, WordPress installed on IIS can be somewhat aggravating because it doesn’t have permalink functionality out of the box. You have to jump through several hoops to get it to work. Mine works for the most part now, but it doesn’t work when you click the “next” link on pages that have large numbers of posts.
I’ve been thinking about a possible solution to this. Would it be possible to use a custom 404 page on IIS to act as a intermediary page that does what mod_rewrite would normally. Here’s how it would work:
1. Set IIS to redirect all 404 errors to a custom page that would handle all interpretation of the permalinks. In IIS, you have the option of specifying whether it i s a file, or a url. It must be set to “url” to work. Here’s a page that goes into this theory. http://evolvedcode.net/content/code_smart404/guide-rewrites.asp
2. All that would be left to do then would be to write a page that interpreted the rules that wordpress gives you and redirects accordingly.
Sorry if this was a little confusing, I’ll be trying this out in a week or so and I’ll let you know the results in a clearer format.
Related Threads from WordPress.org
IIS URL Rewrite Rules?
Enabling Search engine Friendly (Optimized ) URLs in IIS Without Mod_rewrite
This also looks to be promising: IIS Mod’s Free URL ReWrite
21 Nov 05 VBScript Array Length
Apparently there is no direct method to determine the length of an array in VBScript. The best way I could find is to use UBound(ArrayName). This will return the upper limit of the array. Unfortunately, it doesn’t account for empty items in the array. In the example below Length will be equal to 10, not 1.
Dim NewArray(10)
NewArray(0) = "Apple"
Length = UBound(NewArray) ‘Length is equal to 10, not 1
Here is a good link to VBScript Array functions.
http://www.shocknet.org.uk/defpage.asp?pageID=30
If you know of a better way to determine the length, please let me know.
