I have meant to add currently reading/listening/watching lists to my blog sidebar for some time but never got round to exploring the avenue all the way to the end. Until this morning that is, when I tracked down some Amazon integration options for Movable Type (prompted by the need to do the same for WordPress for my sister).

I found a few options out there but I plumped for BookQueueToo, since it seemed easy enough to implement and use. This is built upon the BookQueue and MTAmazon plugins. Assuming you have all the prerequisites, it is just a case of uploading a folder to your plugins directory.

I encountered a few issues in doing this:
Firstly, the plugin was not in my active plugins list. On investigating, I had uploaded my BookQueueToo folder to the plugins directory without realising there was a further BookQueueToo folder nested within it. You just need the nested folder!

After this was fixed, I had the BookQueueToo plugin in the list, but on trying to reach the config page I got a 500 internal server error. On examining my server logs, it transpired that the permissions on mt-bookqueue.cgi were incorrect. The correct setting is 755; if you make it 777 you will get an error saying that others can write to the file.

Finally, I could access the admin interface but my searches were getting no results. As documented in the troubleshooting file, this was because my Amazon Web Service developer key was obsolete. I had signed up ages ago but never used the key so I had to go get a new one.

After all that, it was very easy to compile my product list once BookQueueToo was up and running. I am finding quirks with adding some products, or displaying just CD or Book lists at the moment, and the Rebuild functionality won’t work for me but it meets my needs for now. I would also like the Amazon links to relate to Amazon UK. I have found some useful info on how to use MTAmazon with Amazon UK and I’m hoping that this will work, but having just got things working (the CSS positioning caused the most headaches!), I’m not going to rock the boat!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 28th, 2004 at 3:23 pm and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.