Buy it at AmazonIn my continuing quest to beef-up the blog with useful content, I went through and added links to corresponding content to my previous posts (evidence the videos on the C90 post).

I had to do a reasonable amount of digging to find an Amazon Associate plugin that would do the job. Google comes up with many links, and a few WordPress widgets that looked promising.  But, here’s a bit of info to save anyone following this blog for WordPress tips the hassle of hitting a couple of dead-ends.

The first I tried was “Amazon Widgets Shortcodes”, install and setup was OK, but following the instructions didn’t produce the desired effect.  Not sure if I missed something, but was getting nothing from it, so had another look around for something better.

Next I tried the very well touted and apparently popular “WP-Amazon” widget looks great in the blurb, it installs and configures just fine, but the ‘button’ to do the business didn’t appear as promised by the readme.  It turns out, on further investigation, that the widget has stopped working on more recent versions of WordPress.

Finally, after much searching, I found “Amazon Reloaded for WordPress” which installed and configured, with your associate id,  just fine.  It creates an area at the bottom of the posting page where you can search for the book you want to link to, then select the size of image you want to display and the code is automatically inserted at the cursor position.

I just enclosed the result it in a custom div to allow it to be floated and otherwise formatted (more on that later) and to stick a text link below the pic.  Nice.

I’ve included an example of the outcome in this post, hope you like it.  In this case I’m delighted to recommend a book from a budding new Scottish author.