Grant watches “Go, Diego, Go” from time to time, sometimes in great back-to-back binges if allowed. The theme music is so ingrained in my head that I, in typical Peterson fashion, have written new, borderline filthy lyrics. I sing them just out of earshot sometimes, to a cautionary, “Daddy?” from Mom, if she is around. If you know the tune, you probably know where I sing, “cause he’s an aaaaaaa-hole. Aaaaaaa-hole. No, Diego, No.” We won’t get into the lyrics I sing to the theme of Thomas the Train.
But I digress, for I speak now not of a-holes, but of Amazon aStores. I first had experience with them when I was doing my mother-in-law’s website using Joomla. Like most Amazon Associate tools, I found it to be fairly straightforward to set up and integrate into a site using iframes. They could be made to look like a reasonably integral part of a site. As it turns out, she had trouble with the content management end of things, in terms of adding products, a problem I never experienced. But she is an older person who does not delve particularly deeply into the technical aspect of the internet or computers, and to some extent needed everything spoon-fed to her.
It was always the plan to integrate Scandinavian products into the Althing. That has been done for film, books, and music, using Amazon product links, but as yet I have not migrated those pages to full use of MySQL, and it would be time prohibitive to add products one at a time that way, so I looked at aStores early on. I even did a few mock-ups to see how it might look, but this past week I took the plunge and started using aStores, with the first featured products being Husqvarna, Lego, and Carlsberg. For the latter, of course I wish I could sell good imported Danish beer online, but the next best thing is to list Carlsberg paraphernalia such as signs and lights. As time passes I will be tweaking the store, adding a lot of new stuff, reorganizing what I have. It also could be time soon to add Lutefisk to the site, and we can all experience the smell of good fish gone bad.