Current mood:	aggravated
Entry tags:	food, internets, orz, wtf

All Kinds of BS
I signed up for Amazon Associates and Google AdSense accounts for my new recipe blog (nothing really there yet). Let me tell you, both experiences have been a joy.

I wasn't able to sign up for Google AdSense in Firefox. The long version: I went and filled in the registration forms, and then it asked me if I wanted to use my existing Google account to log in to AdSense as well. I selected "yes", entered my credentials, and hit the "Continue" button. After a bit, it sent me back to the registration form, with all of the fields blank. I was confused and thought that maybe I had accidentally hit the "Back" button instead, so I tried again. Same result. (Also, Roboform didn't like their fields for some reason, so I was doing this all manually, too.) Finally gave up and did it in IE, and of course it worked just fine, Roboform included. GG, Google.

Amazon Associates was much easier, and I didn't have to wait for approval to start using it. I played around with Product Links for my Resources page for a while. I sort of liked their Product Previews script, but I didn't want it to pop up for the text links, so I just disabled it in general. The Enhanced Display option (text and image, with an obvious "Buy from Amazon" button included) was a bit intrusive, so I decided to use image links for the books and then text link to DVDs and a few other things.

First thing I noticed was that the images for the image links were broken. After a bit of frustration, I noticed that the HTML they generated for it contained a relative URL for the image instead and figured it was a bug. Apparently you're not supposed to hotlink their images for this type of Product Link, but they're more than happy to serve the images for their Enhanced Product Links for you. I'm an idiot, because there was text on the Build Link page that notified me that I would have to upload the images somewhere else to use them and I completely missed it. I still don't understand why one type of image is okay to hotlink, but not the other. It's not just a size issue. Right now, I'm hotlinking, but I'll probably change that later today.

The second annoying bit was, of course, finding all of the products I wanted to link. The books were easy to find, since I had their ISBNs; even a search by title yielded results. I was also able to find Alton Brown's salt cellar on Amazon too. Finding DVDs for the TV shows I wanted to share proved to be much more difficult. The ATK Season DVDs were there, but only some had thumbnails, so I decided to go with text links there. The Good Eats DVDs were not all available, so eventually I gave in and just linked to AB's Food Network store. Guess I'm missing out on that. Sometimes it's so hard to find what you want on Amazon.