Amazon Hacks

Create Amazon Associate Links on Your Movable Type Weblog

Integrate Amazon and Movable Type, and you’ll be posting about books to your weblog in no time.

Using external tools to integrate Amazon links into your web publishing system is helpful, but ease of use depends on features being built directly into the software you use to publish. That’s the thinking behind Movable Type’s plug-in system, and MTAmazon is a plug-in that can do much of the integration work for you.

Amazon.com product links, wish lists, and more can be automatically inserted into web sites managed by Movable Type thanks to MTAmazon, a Movable Type plug-in for Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) connect Amazon’s databases with associate sites, showing search results, buttons to buy products, users’ wish lists, and the contents of product categories without requiring the associate to make manual updates. For sites that use Movable Type, the MTAmazon plug-in provides a simple way to make use of AWS.

You can download MTAmazon and get instructions on installation and basic usage from the MTAmazon web site at http://mtamazon.sourceforge.net/.

Provide MTAmazon with a product ID, search string, or the list ID from a Wish List, Listmania! list, or product category, and it will retrieve a wealth of product information and provide Movable Type template tags with which to display it. If you know the ASIN for a product, you can insert a picture of it, the title, the price, and a button to add the item to the Amazon ...