ShelfReferential

Widespread visual changes were made over the last few days, by both Alison and myself. The pages to create and edit FreeForm items were tightened up, as were the pages to create and edit shelves. The sidebar lost those little flowers in favor of a cleaner look. Arial now rules the roost instead of Verdana, though the jury may be out on that one. Meanwhile, on the item side, items now live in a single unified rectangle instead of the tripartite thingie with a box around the picture, the text, and the checkbox. Also, the checkbox now gives a better visual cue by highlighting the item background color. Just a bit more DHTML for your GUI pleasure.

The best new feature, though, is entirely due to Alison. Tooltips! You can see these for example in the “Add FreeForm Item” page. Next to the field for the image URL, there’s a little help graphic which explains what this field is for when you mouse over it. There are more on the Manage Shelves page. This is a great way to include lots of helpful explanatory text without cluttering the page. And the graphic really conveys the presence of extra info in a tiny space.

Now when you view your shelf, you don’t see ugly text edit fields in each item. Instead you see formatted notes, like the visitors to your shelf see. But when you click on them, they become editable fields with a Save and Discard button, so you can still edit them. This obviously only happens on your own shelves. It’s the best of both worlds. Neat!

You can now limit all your Amazon search results (currently that’s all your search results :)) to items sold directly by Amazon. This is helpful for those who don’t like to use zShops, who prefer to deal with Amazon, or who have Amazon Prime. The default setting is off, meaning you’ll see Amazon-sold and non-Amazon-sold items as usual in the search results. To change the setting, visit the My Account page.

This feature works, which is really cool, but it behaves a bit poorly in a couple ways. These are consequences of the fact that I had to implement this as a post-filter after Amazon gives SC the results. First, the total number of found items reported at the top of the results page is not accurate. It’s returned by Amazon and so doesn’t take the filter into account. Second, the paging behaves a bit strangely, since if you ask for 10 results per page (the default), but 4 of those items are not sold by Amazon, then the first page you see will have only 6 items on it!

The solution I implemented is really a workaround for a well-known bug in Amazon’s web services. Actually, it’s a giant missing feature of their web site as well. They don’t offer a way to filter searches in either place to return items sold directly by Themselves. Actually in the case of the web services it’s worse. They do offer a mechanism to do this, but it doesn’t work, it returns items not sold by Amazon. Some bug. I’m starting to think that they actually want it this way, because they are in a bind with their partners. Actually, it’s a conflict of interest. If they make it easy to filter away all their partners’ goods, then that’s not likely to please the partners, is it? This is the problem with being a store that is also a storefront for other stores. Amazon Prime makes this worse, because now you actually pay Amazon to treat their items specially (better shipping), but they won’t filter search results to show you items that benefit from Prime.