Amazon Weirdness

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.