Amazon BuyItBomb Readme (zon.cgi)

Bo's "Zon" script is a great cgi script for newbies to use to learn to install scripts, as it's about as easy as it gets when it comes to installation...

Installation Instructions

Get the latest version of zon.zip. It requires the CGI and LWP perl modules (similar to most bombs).

Unzip the file

Open zon.cgi and edit and change the associate_id at the top of the cgi file.

Check the path to perl on the first line and modify if necessary.
Find and change the associate_id (kmelvin-20) at the top of the file to your id s you'll be paid for any sales instead of me.
In your cgi-bin create a folder called: zon

Upload all files to the "zon" folder on your server

Chmod/set permissions to 755 for zon.cgi

Open zon.cgi in your browser and do some searching. The URL should be something like:
www.YourDomain.com/cgi-bin/zon/zon.cgi

An example search and how to use it:

Search for="Sean Connery", Type="keyword", Category="DVD"

Review the HTML results to make sure they look valid.
You can see there are three columns in the results:

The 1st column is a Medium sized image and the title to show what the product looks like.

The 2nd column contains all of the "tags" for use in customizing your rss template (see RSS customization below for more details)

The 3rd column contains the value of the tag that will be replaced in the template.

You can display other results pages by selecting the page pulldown and highlighting the page you want to view, and Re-submitting.

To prepare the data for blogbomb, change the format pulldown to "RSS" so that the correct format of the file is created. Re-submit.

The RSS should look valid. It should contain the appropriate template information that you have specified (basic or detailed).

Copy the URL and paste into blogbomb_admin and voila, you have Amazon products ready for selling with blogbomb via RSS.

*** Notice the "format=rss" argument in the URL. That is what controls the output format ... html, xml or rss

Everything below is OPTIONAL. Don't mess with this unless you are good with html/code:

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RSS Customization
You can modify the way RSS results are displayed with the template. For example, the default template is in the rss_basic.html file and looks like this:

<a href="%%BuyItURL%%"><img border=0 src="%%ImageUrlMedium%%"><br>
Buy this from Amazon.com</a><br>
Price %%OurPrice%%

Notice there are three "tags" in the template:

%%BuyItURL%%

%%ImageUrlMedium%%

%%OurPrice%%
More tags are available and their names are displayed in the 2nd column of the HTML results. All you do is put "%%" around the tag and the script will replace it with the corresponding value in the 3rd column.

Searching with HTML results allows you to browse the database before using the results in blogbomb.

Here are the contents of the rss_detailed.html template:

<a href="%%BuyItURL%%"><img border=0 src="%%ImageUrlLarge%%"><br>
Buy this from Amazon.com</a><br>
<b>Price:</b> %%OurPrice%%<br>
<b>Description:</b> %%ProductDescription%%<br>
<b>Customer Rating</b> %%AvgCustomerRating%%<br>
<b>Customer Comments:</b> %%Comment%%

Notice, the addition of these new tags:

%%ProductDescription%%

%%AvgCustomerRating%%

%%Comment%%
These tags can add some "words" to the results for the SE's to find.

To customize your RSS results, you can copy one of these templates to your own template file (it must have a .html extension) or edit one of the existing files to make the rss description field contain your desired information. Your template can contain any html code you want such as links, tables, fonts, etc. Blogbomb seems to work quite well with almost any type of html you can throw at it.