Background: I made a massive post some time ago, when I compiled my Desert Island C90 tape.  It felt really long as I created it and subsequently edited it quite a few times and added to it.  There are 24 tracks on the post, each with a little bit of blurb and embedded video and, added to that, some introductory blurb and ‘buy it’ Amazon MP3 options.

The thought occurred to me that maybe I should come up with a method of splitting it up into manageable chunks to make it easy for the reader.  So, how to do…?

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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.

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** Note: This plugin has subsequently been replaced by another **

Added the ‘add-to-any‘ button to allow social bookmarking. A great implementation, easy to include and configure. I went for a bit of repositioning of the default location for the button, to slip it in on the same line as the post footer.

I followed the instructions on manual deployment, but found that I had to modify 3 of the php files from the theme, as opposed to the two mentioned in the ‘readme’.

Maybe it’s the theme I’m using, not altogether au fait with all this yet. I had to modify (i) index.php as that displays all posts, (ii) posts.php as that displays single posts and also (iii) archive.php as that displays posts batched under an archive, or otherwise grouped by category.

That said, once I found the necessary locations to mod, it was a simple paste of the code into the file and all was good.

I just implemented the ‘Twitter Tools‘ plugin. Again, surprisingly easy to bolt-on, no issues and looks to be working just fine, first time. I could get used to this level of ‘fit for purpose-ness’.

I went mainly for the defaults in terms of configuration. Simply set it up with my login for Twitter and away we went.

Some great features in this plugin; (i) It displays your recent Twitter activity in the sidebar, (ii) You can Tweet directly from the site if you’re logged in and (iii) It automatically consolidates your tweets into a daily/weekly blog-post.