WordPress themes and Amazon links

Anyone reading this blog is probably tired of me posting about WordPress by now, but I wanted to write a quick follow-up post on my new theme. My base theme is Stargazer, from Theme Hybrid. I’m using a fairly simple child theme of my own creation, that tweaks just a few things from the main theme.

One thing I’ve been doing is going back through the old posts that I imported from Blogger, and trying to clean up any display issues. The first thing I addressed was the display of program code, which I think is looking reasonably good now. That required just a bit of tweaking in the child theme, and a switchover to using the Gist shortcode provided by Jetpack.

I also found that pretty much anything that I had embedded from any other site was getting messed up. I cleared up most of those problems using other shortcodes. So now, YouTube videos and SoundCloud embeds are looking reasonable. (And, as a side project, I replaced some dead video links with working ones.) In the case of some fairly oddball embeds, I just removed them entirely. Some were pointing to dead web sites, and others just weren’t worth bothering with.

The last big nut to crack was all the Amazon Associates links that I had scattered through the blog. Those were using iframes, and they weren’t displaying quite right. I messed with this myself for awhile, but eventually gave up.

The Stargazer theme is free and open source, but you can get support for it by signing up for the author’s “club”. Just this week, he dropped the price for a one-year membership from $29 to $10, so I went ahead and signed up, then posted about my issue in the forums. Well, I got a fix from him within 24 hours, I copied it up to my blog, and it’s working great. So, thanks to Justin for being awesome. If you’re in the market for a free WordPress theme, definitely give Theme Hybrid a look.

By the way, I’ve never made any money at all from any of the Amazon Associates links I have on this blog. But I like the look of the little product widgets, so I’m going to keep using them. (I stuck a fairly random one at the top of this post, for no particular reason.)

One thought on “WordPress themes and Amazon links”

  1. I’m glad we got your issue figured out. The bit of code that controls that has been a pain point for me with various items, but it also does some really cool stuff with handling the multitude of embedded content. Rest assured that I’m continuously trying to make it better.

    I see you’ve been blogging a couple of years longer than me. You’re coming up on 13 years!

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