Following the discussion on TechCrunch, I’m trying out BloggerKit. It’s a simple way to add contextually-appropriate Amazon links to a blog entry. I’ve had my Amazon account for ages, but it’s such a bother to deal with I rarely do.

It’s rather simple, a little code in the template and then you add keywords to the entry. It’s best to do as a comment so they don’t show (and you don’t get in trouble with Google for hiding them). At the bottom of this entry is:

<!--
bk_keywords:Movable Type
-->

What’s good about BloggerKit versus other such Amazon-tied programs is that it’s not automatically generated (you have to manually add the keywords), so if you have another contextual ad program on your site there’s no worries about violating the TOS. To me, that’s worth giving back 15% of the income I wouldn’t be making in the first place without it.

I don’t plan to add this to every page, just when I’m talking about something “shoppable.” To make this relevant to what I’m talking about, I guess I’ll now mention that I upgraded to beta 2 of Movable Type 3.3 last night. So far, so good. Still amazing how easy the Six Apart folks have made the process compared to when I first started with MT back at version 2.5 ish. The most obvious changes (that I can see) are in the default templates and the addition of a widget manager. Not sure how that works yet.