Why don't Amazon and Typepad play nice together?

August 23, 2005 9:43 AM

Amazon links and Typepad blogs don't play nice together.

Let me explain the issue that I'm experiencing with posting links generated by Amazon Associates on my Typepad blog. The problem is that Amazon links contain the & symbol, and when that symbol is pasted into Typepad the Rich Text Editor converts it to a & amp; which is the proper code in HTML for the & symbol. Amazon links do not like seeing & amp; in a URL instead of &, so my Amazon links are broken on my blog. Even if I remove the amp; by hand, Typepad restores it when I switch between text view modes. Even opening an existing post for editing restores the amp; text.

I thought I had a way around this by composing my posts in Rich Text mode and then switching to plain text for posting, but it turns out that posting as plain text sends unformatted HTML code into my Atom feed which is annoying my readers, to say the least.

So, after all of this, my question: how can I keep Typepad from changing the links that Amazon generates?

posted by Servo5678 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Sounds like a bug in their new wysiwyg interface. You should probably post a support request from within the application.
posted by mathowie at 9:59 AM on August 23, 2005

Response by poster:

Sounds like a bug in their new wysiwyg interface. You should probably post a support request from within the application.

Already done that, but I thought I'd ask here too. I can't be the only one dealing with this issue.
posted by Servo5678 at 10:04 AM on August 23, 2005

If a link that contains & in the HTML source doesn't get turned back into an & when you click the link, it's your browser that's broken.

(Of course if Typepad is putting & in the HTML, then the problem is Typepad and not the browser)
posted by cillit bang at 10:04 AM on August 23, 2005

Response by poster: The links originally contain & amp;, but Amazon doesn't take those links when they're clicked on. Amazon wants to see & in the URL, not & amp;. Removing the amp; does no good, as on the next refresh the offending text snippet has returned.

I've considered that it's just my computer, but after trying this on two different WinXP machines and both Firefox and Internet Explorer, I'm stumped.
posted by Servo5678 at 10:16 AM on August 23, 2005

Reiterating the "browser is broken" point; if your browser isn't converting the entity to a literal ampersand when you click the link, your browser's got issues.
posted by ubernostrum at 11:28 AM on August 23, 2005

1. Amazon URLs containing encoded ampersands work just fine in Firefox and Safari. So the problem is definitely the browser, and neither Amazon nor Typepad -- assuming that the ampersand is really the source of the problem.

2. I'm not aware of any type of Amazon page that requires ampersands in the URL. Variables passed in Amazon URLs are used for user behavior tracking, not addressing content; you should be able to delete everything from the first ampersand through to the end of URL and still get where you're going.
posted by jjg at 11:33 AM on August 23, 2005

Assuming the site linked in your profile is the Typepad site in question, the links on your site work perfectly for me in Safari.
posted by katieinshoes at 11:51 AM on August 23, 2005

Response by poster: Asking for help through Amazon produced this response:

The problem is Typepad.

"&" and "& amp;" in a link on an (X)HTML page should be interperted the same way. (They don't work the same pasted into the address bar of a browser, however.)

Some publishing software, apparently Typepad included, will try to make the final code as compliant as possible. That means they convert "&" to "& amp;". The problem is that they're too dumb to realize that they shouldn't be converting an "& amp;" because it's already converted. So you end up with final code that looks like "& amp;amp;".

Up until a few weeks ago, Build Links did not create links that were valid XHTML. They used "&" instead of "& amp;". (The valid url's contain just "&", but a valid url isn't always valid XHTML.) There were lots of complaints about the links being produced not being compliant, and it was changed.

So now Build Links produces valid XHTML code, but a substantial number of people can't use it because their publishing software double-encodes it.

And I think this is exactly what's going on. I first noticed the links not working a few weeks ago which lines up with when Amazon changed how they create links. The more recent links on my blog work because I've been hand-editing them, but Typepad undoes my edits each time the page is republished. I'm also led to believe my hand-editing is somehow breaking my Atom feed, but that's a problem for another day.

Oy, this shouldn't be this much of a production.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:03 PM on August 23, 2005

Submit a TypePad support request. Everytime I've done this, they've been great.

And maybe I'm missing something here, but have you tried doing it the other way around from how you describe it? Composing your post in the Rich Text/WYSIWYG window, but then switching into the HTML view when you put in the links? The link button will still work in the HTML view, or you could just use [a href] and do it manually. When you switch back to Rich Text, will it edit it out?

I'm having some slight issues with the text size selection in the Rich Text window, and I usually just go into HTML view and use the [small] tag manually, which seems to work well.
posted by Vidiot at 9:23 PM on August 24, 2005