Amazon Associates!
Your complaints have been heard—Amazon gave it a thumbs up! You can now use your Amazon Associates id within a blog widget, and take back a small fraction of the $1/day all 200 or so blog widgets are making me. You don't even need to have a paid account to run off with my haypence. That's how generous I am.
(Frankly, I'd rather not to link to Amazon, but it's a requirement if I use their cover image. Of course the text links go to your library or the book itself.)
(Frankly, I'd rather not to link to Amazon, but it's a requirement if I use their cover image. Of course the text links go to your library or the book itself.)
posted by Tim at 9:36 AM
14 Comments:
But the blog widgets don't work with live journal! I've mentioned Library Thing three times on my lj, but a picture is worth blah blah, so what would it take to make html widgets that work on lj?
And I keep saying I'll take a break from cataloguing and then I get sucked in again!
I need to sign up for an account to check, but doesn't LJ prevent all outside widgets? I can't remember seeing one. Have you?
LJ prevents javascript. It will accept HTML. I'm not entirely certain how one defines "widget"-ness, so this may or may not answer the question.
I do LJ a little differently than most people. I actually have a Blogger blog, which uses HTML, so I have my widget prominently displayed on my page. For LJ, I have a "mirror blog", which I did by having a friend with a paid account create a syndication of my Blogger blog. I do have an LJ friends list, but a large part of it is people's syndications.
I would highly recommend doing this, because Blogger blogs are free, and they are very flexible in design. Check out my blog if you want to see how it works (http://effulgent.blogspot.com). You can see my LJ Friends link to see how I work my LJ blog and synch it with my Blogger blog.
I don't think switching to Blogger's a reasonable alternative for some people - and your idea is partly dependent on having a paid account feed. As for myself, I happen to happy with the format of livejournal, and don't know anyone on Blogger, in fact.
Tim, is there a way to make an rss feed verision of the catalogue? That could be used, I suspct, to generate a html widget.
LJ prevents javascript. It will accept HTML.
The widget uses Javascript, and LJ bans all Javascript in it's pages. So yes, it's a problem.
An RSS feed would not allow an HTML-only widget, sadly.
I find myself using the blog widget creation page as a search tool, to look up top tags and authors. It's also fun to see random books. One small problem: top books never finds anything. What is it looking for?
Quick question: are more complex tag searches on your to-do list?
Eg "show me books that are tagged as 'programming' but not 'web'"
Re: Advanced searching
http://www.librarything.com/blog/2005/09/search-added-better-or-worse.php
http://flickrbadge.theducky.com/
This is an html badge for flickr. However, I see now that it runs off external scripts the maker has. Nasty stuff.
I can't get the blog widgets to work with bebo.com either.
Parelle writes in the comments: I don't think switching to Blogger's a reasonable alternative for some people - and your idea is partly dependent on having a paid account feed. As for myself, I happen to happy with the format of livejournal, and don't know anyone on Blogger, in fact.
Why wouldn't it be a reasonable alternative? And what is a "paid account feed"? Perhaps you're talking about something Live-Journaly, but Blogger is free. And highly customizable. Don't see anything unreasonable about it.
A syndicated RSS feed (e.g. Blogger mirror) doesn't look or behave the same way as an LJ account. It's clunky and doesn't appeal to someone who's spent a long time getting LJ just as they want it, I should think. There are people who've invested a lot of money and more than four years in LJ so won't be switching just to implement one java widget.
I do appreciate two things from Amazon...the cover shot as you mentioned...and being able to paste a review into LibThing. It helps me remember later what the book was about. Lazy man's way of creating a synopsis. It would be wonderful if there was an option to grab this automatically, as you do with the cover.
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