Amazon Weirdness
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Geekery, Reading
I’m tired. I spent entirely too much time over the last 48 hours futzing with the library part of this site.
The software I use to create that, Now Reading, automatically pulls images of book covers from Amazon whenever I add a book to the library. Amazon automatically sets affiliate links up that way, so they’ve already said they don’t mind (there are affiliate links to them on every page, so they are getting their traffic). I don’t usually hotlink to anything, but some companies actually prefer it.
For some reason, the images keep going away randomly. Some are for older books, but some are for fairly new releases, too. Amazon still has an image on their pages, but the graphics have moved on their servers.
I know they’ve tried to get their affiliates to use their dynamically-generated widgets, which would presumably update themselves when a file is moved. I don’t care. I want to link to specific items that I’ve read or want to read or want to talk about, not whatever their algorithms decide to link to.
Now I get to go through all 600+ books in the library, find images for their covers, save same to my server, and update the library records.
Foo.
Tags: affiliate links, Amazon, Now Reading
