After being an Amazon Associate for many years I recently received an email saying they would terminate my account for lack of sales. The Althing has not been a cash cow during its years of existence. It has been a labour of love that many would have abandoned years ago. It’s like fishing. Although I haven’t been in years, I enjoy fishing. Sometimes I catch fish, sometimes I don’t. In that time I have discovered that folks who are really good at fishing go to a spot, fish for a short time, and if the fish are not biting they move on…all day long, if necessary. They just keep moving and moving until they find a good spot where the fish are biting. I, on the other hand, am the sort of stubborn asshole that will just sit and sit in one spot. Maybe I will move once or twice, but no more. I’ll try different bait, different gear, cast in different locations from the boat or shore, but by and large I stay put. Don’t know what that says about my personality.
Now, if you are familiar with the Althing you know it has by no means remained static. When health and time permits I update it and try to make it more interesting for folks. I have worked hard on making the code behind the scenes more efficient. Through it all I have enjoyed the process, or most of it. This, however, looks like it’s going to suck big time. Apparently Amazon will not let you do anything to reactivate the account. They do allow you to apply for a new account, but this will mean generating new links for everything you see for sale on Amazon on my site. Perhaps if I knew of a way to do a periodic call to Amazon to pull the links for the items in question and store the links in my database it would be simple, but I know of no such way. I know of no Amazon API that provides such an avenue and I do not have the coding ability to make something from scratch that will do it.
Oh well. Just venting a bit, but I’m going to keep fishing this spot. Time to get to work. Thanks for listening.