For years now, I’ve been a member of Amazon.com’s Associates program. That means I have links to Amazon products on this site, and if someone clicks through to Amazon from one of them and buys something, I get a commission. I don’t get enough traffic for this to be really valuable; in fact, it’s taken a year or two for my commission to build up to the $10 minimum for which they will make a payment. But it doesn’t cost me anything, and I enjoy recommending the books and movies you can find on static pages elsewhere on this site.

Anyway, just for the heck of it I installed a WordPress plugin yesterday that implements Amazon’s new “context links” program. This program generates automatic text links to Amazon items. There is a maximum number of links that the program will generate on a given page.

So far, the program seems to work fairly well. But if you find the occasional bizarre or inappropriate link — for example, if I write a post about Paul Revere the Revolutionary War figure and Amazon links it to an album by the 1960s rock star — please be aware that some of these links are machine generated, and not necessarily my personal recommendation.