June 04, 2004

Getting more from your Amazon.ca/com/de/co.uk affiliations.

Posted at 07:15 PM Toolbox

I have been providing links to Amazon.com on this site (www.synaptic.bc.ca) for a few years now and have been trying to figure out a way to expand the utility so folks from parts of the world outside the US could take advantage of the links.

Completely altruistic of me, of course. Has nothing to do with the fact that I don't earn a thing if I send users to the US site and they end up buying from Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom) or Amazon.de (Germany) or Amazon.ca (Canada).
No way.

So the question has been, "How do I provide multiple links to the other Amazon sites without having to do a whole lot of work?"

A: amazon_products_feed.cgi, (AFP) a free CGI script from MrRat @ AbsoluteFreebies.com

This is one of those no-brainer decisions. Installs in minutes and the generic interface works straight out of the box. Add some custom templating and you get something that looks like this! Well, actually, that took a fair bit of work, but it looked pretty similar to that on the very first go.

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), the script natively supports US, UK and German affiliations, and with a little templating it's a cinch to add product links for Amazonia to your Canadian, French and Japanese affiliations as well.

I've not incorporated it into my blogspace yet, but I will, and will also update the macros I wrote to call MTAmazon. It may be possible to sidestep MTAmazon completely. I run multiple blogs which share templates, so there are some issues I need to work out regarding how to to get the macros to tell (AFP) which template to use, but it ain't rocket science.

In the meantime, I'll share a couple tidbits for cool AFP implementation tricks in the comments below. ('cause one of them is already marked-up for phpBB anyway.)

Posted by Patrick at June 4, 2004 07:15 PM