November 12, 2003
Amazon.com has a great referral system. Any website owner can sign up for an Amazon Associates account, place Amazon links on their site and collect a percentage of the sales generated by their referrals. My referrals have provided me an amazing $8.06 in the last four months, which over the course of a year may actually cover my hosting and domain registration costs. (Or maybe six Vente Mocha Malt Frappuccinos - except Amazon doesn't carry those.)
*You will want to either add the new classes (book_category, book_section, book_entry & book_title) to the stylesheet for your blog or modify this template to use styles you have already defined. You will also want to substitute the kingoffools-20 (2 places) with your own Amazon Associates ID (although if you would rather give me all your referrals, I would be a fool to turn it down).
Amazon provide plenty of tools for generating many different kinds of links, but manually generating links for specific books is very tedious. Read on if you would prefer a very simple way to have Movable Type manage your booklist for you...
Here are step by step instructions on creating a Movable Type booklist:
Step 1: Create a New Weblog
Movable Type allows multiple weblogs. From the Main Menu, select Create New Weblog and name it Reading List.Step 2: Remove Unneded Templates
Select the Templates button and remove all defined templates except for Main Index.Step 3: Modify the Index Template
Edit Main Index template and set the Output file to 'books.html'. Replace the Template Body with the template shown below:
<MTCategories>
<!-- CATEGORY TITLE -->
<h3 class="book_category"><$MTCategoryLabel$></h3>
<div class="book_section">
<!-- ENTRIES -->
<MTEntries sort_order="descend" lastn="10">
<div class="book_entry">
<!-- IMAGE -->
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<$MTEntryBody$>/kingoffools-20" target="_blank">
<IMG SRC="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/<$MTEntryBody$>.01.THUMBZZZ.jpg" border="0" alt="<$MTEntryTitle$>" hspace="3" vspace="3" align=left>
</A>
<!-- DESCRIPTION -->
<div class="book_title">
<br>
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<$MTEntryBody$>/kingoffools-20" target="_blank">
<$MTEntryTitle$>
</A>
<BR><$MTEntryMore$>
</div>
<BR CLEAR=ALL>
</div>
</MTEntries>
</div>
</MTCategories>
This template uses the smallest book thumbnail. You can modify the template so it uses a different size thumbnail or omits the thumbnail altogether. Play with the Amazon Associates link generate and look at the generated links to figure out the naming convention for the different thumbnail sizes.
Step 4: Define Template Categories
This is required, even if you just want your reading list in one category. Create each category and be sure to add a category description. The blogroll sorts the categories by name but displays the description instead. The reason for this is to allow the categories to be displayed in an order other than alphabetical.Step 5: Add Reading List Entries
This is as simple as adding New Entries to the Reading List Weblog. The title should be the name of the book. The content should contain the ISBN number (easy to find at Amazon.com). Extended Entry should contain the Author's Name. Here is an example:
Title: When Character Was King
Entry Body: 0142001686
Extended Entry: Peggy Noonan
Keep in mind that the books are sorted within each category by entry date. Books not assigned to a category will not appear in the booklist.
Entry Body: 0142001686
Extended Entry: Peggy Noonan
Step 6: Add the booklist to Your Blog Template
Determine which page types should include the booklist. For each of those templates, add the following line at the place where the booklist should appear:
<$MTInclude file="books.html"$>
That is all that is required. Maintaining the booklist is as simple as adding, editing and deleting entries in the Reading List Weblog. It must be noted that whenever the booklist is changed, it is necessary to rebuild the primary blog so the modified books.html is incorporated into your site.
If you have questions or issues with this, feel free to contact me.
UPDATE: I failed to mention that it is important to set the Default Text Formatting for the booklist weblog to None.
