Quickie post. The links in the Tales By The Road post work perfectly. Just so long as the post is in draft or preview mode in WordPress…

Sigh. You will get a “500 – Service Unavailable Error” page when you click either the image or the text link. There is nothing wrong with either link – something is going on between WordPress and Amazon.

Workaround, while I dig further to figure out what is wrong, and how to fix it – go back up to your URL bar and hit Enter again. The same URL will then work just fine.

And – the links are fixed. A stupid newbie trick, I had not made the blog public…

Not so easy to figure out, though – not for the average writer starting out; I worked it out fairly quickly only thanks to my previous incarnation as a web developer. So, a bit of explanation here…

I looked at the HTML source for the WordPress page. As usual, that looks like so much gibberish, with a bit of English scattered here and there. I looked for the links to Amazon in that pile… Ah ha! WordPress was sending the real link through an “anonymizer” site. What those sites do is to make it impossible for a site that you have linked in your blog to do a reverse link into your blog. This makes sure that only people that you have directly given your blog link to can get to it.

There are many good reasons to have a private blog – but “professional writer” is not one of them, obviously… Amazon doesn’t like not knowing where it’s links are coming from, for very good reason.

OK, now I know what is going on. Easy fix. Really easy fix. Go to “My Site,” then to “Settings,” and scroll down to the “Privacy” section. Set it to “Public” and “SAVE SETTINGS.” As below…