Can’t Get Rich

I was working on one of my websites today, and I decided that it needed an eBay feed. I was going to use my typical method for embedding a feed into a page, but I discovered that technique wouldn’t really work with a static Wordpress page. I dug around for a bit, and I discovered a plugin called phpBay Pro. It looked like exactly what I needed, but it also cost $49. I didn’t really want to spend any money, so I kept looking. A short while later, I found phpBay Pro’s little brother - phpBay Lite. Completely free, phpBay Lite does about 10% of what phpBay Pro does: The bare minimum. That’s exactly what I wanted.

What does it do?

phpBay Lite is pretty neat: It allows you to embed eBay auctions in your blog posts using an incredibly simple interface. All you have to do is supply your affiliate ID, paste the code into your page, and give it a keyword and maximum number of items. See, look:

Conn 7BW French Horn mouthpiece- BRAND NEW! SEALED! US $15.00 (1 Bid) Auction Ends: Thursday Dec-04-2008 15:43:16 PST Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

French Horn to Mellophone Adapter Trumpet Shank US $9.99 Auction Ends: Thursday Dec-04-2008 15:49:56 PST Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

Bundy French Horn US $39.00 (9 Bids) Auction Ends: Thursday Dec-04-2008 16:10:28 PST Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

I tell it to show three items using the keyword ‘French Horn’, and it does all the rest. Simple and clean.

The downside

While it gets the job done, it doesn’t give you many options. You can’t set a price range, you can’t tweak the output display, and you can’t do any kind of advanced searching. Like I said, all you can do is specify keywords and number of results. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

The bottom line

It’s free and it’s easy. If you want to embed an auction feed into Wordpress, this is the plugin to use. If you want to use more advanced search options with a non-Wordpress page, try using RSS2HTML with the technique I linked at the beginning of this entry.

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