Installing some more plugins on our Movable Type server here… I want to put links to amazon for the books I’ve been reading, the music I’ve been listening to, movies I’ve rented, etc… I was just about to write my own perl client to interface with Amazon’s “web services” which would let me link to their stuff and not host any images etc on my server. This would be fairly complex but fairly quick (maybe a single evening to write, another evening to debug).
Then it turns out someone has already written such a thing-
MTAmazon. Except guess what- it doesn’t support per-entry tags. That is, using it, you would only really get to have them in your “template”, or the non-dynamic part of the site. It’s just like having a static “home page” of the past decade- want to change your list of “Top 5 British Invasion Covers By Female Punk Bands” ? You have to go into the template and edit your list. As opposed to just posting a new entry in a special category, as seen in the “Daily Links” on the right.
So I was thinking, what the hell- why not just put that in? Then I realised it might be a limitation in MT itself… looking through their message boards, this has indeed been requested a few times. But their answer- “well you can work around this by adding [yet another] library module,
MTMacro.”
Geez. Basically it’s going to be like 2 people able to do this, because either no one will care or no one will be capable of installing all this gear. Those who don’t CARE enough, ok whatever with them. But content providers won’t be able to use it, because it requires major hacking… which means they get no Amazon sales.
Is it simple Puritain Work Ethic? More work = more reward? Or is it the “I got mine” philosophy? “I got it to work, so I don’t see what you’re problem is.” No effort is expended to make something easier, because hey, it works for me!
Anyway to make this story even longer the guy who does MTMacro has some kind of
loopy pop-up interface for his Amazon links, which, yes, require ANOTHER library to be installed. Whatever!