CaRP Tips

CaRP gets podcast support, themes

Antone Roundy — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:19:00 -0700

I released a new version of CaRP yesterday with a few added features. First, the mundane: CaRP error messages are now linked by default to a page in the documentation that explains how to fix them. You can turn the links off or turn the error messages off altogether using the carperrors setting. Now on to the fun stuff.

First, I've added podcast support. At first, I planned to just write some sample code showing how to do it with the old version, but I quickly discovered that it was impossible...

How to display Japanese RSS feeds using CaRP

Antone Roundy — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:22:00 -0700

I just released an update to CaRP that makes the truncation code that is used to limit the length of titles and description multi-byte aware. In the past, CaRP counted each byte as a character even for characters composed of multiple bytes, and ran the risk of chopping a chacter in half if a multibyte character spanned the truncation boundary. The new version won't do that. The bad news is that that's not the only problem CaRP had with multibyte feeds. The good news is that I've got a solutio...

Incentives for CaRP users to help each other?

Antone Roundy — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:12:00 -0700

I've just posted in the CaRP user forum regarding what incentives I can provide for CaRP users to help each other with tech support questions and such. It's not that I begrudge doing tech support--just that it's often difficult to impossible to manage all the different tasks that I have to juggle, and if possible, I'd like to free up more time for adding features and working on the next generation versions of CaRP and Grouper and some add-on products that many of you have expressed interest i...

Displaying RSS feeds in Mambo/Joomla content

Antone Roundy — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 10:12:00 -0700

If you'd like to display an RSS feed on your Mambo or Joomla CMS-powered site, the easiest way is to install the "Add PHP" mambot. Then put your CaRP code into a PHP file, upload it to your server, and pull it into your content like this: {rdaddphp file=rssfeed.php} (type the curly braces and everything between them into the content editor, with the filename changed as needed, and a relative path to the file added if needed).

Displaying RSS feeds in ASP pages using CaRP

Antone Roundy — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 15:52:00 -0700

CaRP is a PHP script, so naturally, using it in PHP pages is easier than in non-PHP pages. You may already know that you can use CaRP's JavaScript output option to display feeds in non-PHP pages. You may also know that if you do that, search engines won't be able to see the feed's content. You may know that with SSI, you can often #include a PHP page into another page and have the PHP code executed. But sometimes SSI #includes don't trigger the PHP code in the page that's being imported. Here...

CaRP's Amazon.com associates example code has been updated

Antone Roundy — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:12:00 -0600

The Amazon.com associates example code has been udpated to work with Amazon's latest changes to their web services API. A few of the changes include:

* Uses Access Key IDs instead of Developer Tokens or Subscription IDs (neither of which is being issued to new associates anymore since they're not used by the latest API).

* Has built-in support for searching non-US Amazon sites.

* The number of characters displayed from each review is configurable.

* The example page lists available search indexes...

Multi-affiliates search page example using CaRP and Grouper

Antone Roundy — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 10:50:00 -0600

I've posted an Affiliates RSS Example showing how CaRP and Grouper can be used to create a search page for multiple affiliates programs. A few noteworthy notes:

1) The affiliate search results are displayed on your website so that if your visitor doesn't find anything interesting, they're still on your site.

2) Multiple merchant sites can be searched from the same page, increasing the probability of your visitors finding something they're interested in. At the moment, the example code only sear...