Unravelling Amazon link formats

Bruce — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 05:25:16 +0000

According to Mint, most of my blog visitors are American. To reflect this I decided to change my default Amazon Associates links from the UK to the US. In the process I got confused over the link syntax I should be using, but now have this sorted. For managing links to specific items on my site (automatically tagged with my Associates ID) I use Amazon Media Manager. AMM is a WordPress plugin that will randomly show a specified number of product links, categories of which can be matched to categories on your blog. AMM development is not active, however, it is easy to hack the plugin to use the more recent link syntax. Which link to the Amazon homepage? My links to the UK store (as indicated by the -21 in my Associates ID) looked like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home?tag=bioneuralblog-21&site=amazon Unfortunately you can't use the same Associates ID for each store; it is necessary to apply for an Associates ID for each program individually. Your referral fees thus cannot be combined. In my first e-mail from Amazon US I was advised that this was my unique Amazon.com homepage linking format: http://www.amazon.com?%5Fencoding=UTF8&tag=bioneuralnet-20 Soon after I received a second e-mail confirming my application had been approved, saying that this was my unique Amazon.com homepage linking format: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/bioneuralnet-20 I contacted Customer Support and was advised to use the following syntax: http://www.amazon.com/?tag=bioneuralnet-20 Hence my confusion. Some more prodding and Customer Service explained: All of the links track to your account. Some formats are not compatible with some web building programs, so we supply a variety of linking ...

Ads in your iBlog RSS feed

Bruce — Thu, 26 May 2005 21:04:53 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Google are currently beta-testing intergration of AdSense adverts with various blogging systems. A few of the feeds I subscribe to in NetNewsWire now carry ads (e.g. Engadget). Since I already use AdSense and it makes a (tiny) amount of $US, I applied to be a beta tester out of curiosity but was turned down. However, I decided to try and make it work anyway using iBlog... This article refers to iBlog (version 1.x), a Mac blogging client that was formerly used to publish this site. It may refer to design elements and other features that have since been replaced. Google AdSense FeedPage.txt is the file that iBlog uses as a template to generate your RSS feed. It's just a text file so easy to edit. I simply copied the AdSense code I use in iBlog's Navigation Editor and pasted it into the file after the <$EntryAbstractOrBody$> placeholder tag. It didn't work. I'm guessing because the AdSense code is a JavaScript and/ or contains multiple line breaks. Amazon Associates I also have an Amazon Associates account. With a small amount of editing you can make the iframe code generated by the link builder into valid XHTML. When you're done just paste the code into FeedPage.txt after the <$EntryAbstractOrBody$> tag; you might want to add a break before and after the iframe for cosmetic reasons. Each iBlog entry in the feed displays a different ad. In NetNewsWire the ads appear at the bottom of the abstract (it works in Safari RSS too):

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Unravelling Amazon link formats

Ads in your iBlog RSS feed