Amazon launching product previews (more stuff on the same space)
Amazon just launched a new feature for its Associates. Product previews lets you open a small informational window when your visitor is hovering your product link. It works well enough and is easy to incorporate, with nifty little guide-like things added to your Associates page.
Unfortunately this new features relies on you putting a Javascript at the end of every page you use it on, which really doesn’€™t suit WordPress well. You could probably put it in your footer and have it on all pages, and if you have Amazon ads everywhere then that’€™s fine, but if you like me just want to link every now and then it screws up stuff a bit.
See it in action in my book review (link at the bottom) and check out the FAQ (login required).
I’ve been using the product previews for awhile, starting in early beta (using blogger). Amazon claims that the maximum time it allows the script enhancer to run is 2 seconds… so I’m wondering what exactly the trouble is for putting the javascript in your footer. I understand not wanting javascript to load when it isn’t necessary, but there have to be some trade-offs, no? Furthermore, I’m not exactly sure how well the product previews actually work… but they certainly add functionality to my pages, and are generally better designed than most amazon ads. So I use ’em. And I enjoy ’em.
I’m also guessing that if you really only want them to appear on linked pages, could you not add a quick javascript snippet to each entry with an amazon link? Maybe a bit cumbersome, but no more so than actually linking an individual product in amazon.com.
Onward. And blessings. And I hope you find a good way to do whatever it is you want to do with product previews. If anything.
Terry
It’s not the matter of teh scripts’ runtime that I feel is the problem with putting it on every page, even ones that don’t use Amazon ads, but the fact that it will delay loading the page. No matter how long Amazon claims the script to run, the code snippet will still send and receive information from external servers and that makes the page load slower. Granted, lots of people will probably not know the difference, and as long as Amazons’ servers are online and stable it’s not a problem, but the practice is wrong in my opinion.
And yes, the product previews looks nice, giving a simple link or image (se link to my blog for the simplest of solutions in the post above) a nice feature.
You can put the script in your post but that is not without problems. The very least is that you’ll find yourself with some extra space at the bottom (again, see my post and compare it to any other – more space between post and social bookmarking stuff is due to the scipt not playing nicely with WordPress posts). It’s working, but it isn’t very pretty. We’ll likely see a plugin that solves this in the near future though, shouldn’t be too much of a deal to do really.
Just to get things straight: I like this feature, it makes it easier for me to just put up a text link, because when my readers get used to the new feature they can get more information just by hovering the link – and I don’t have to put up more ad space for such a simple thing.