News items for tag amazon - Koos van den Hout

I received a message from amazon that The Virtual Bookcase no longer qualifies as an amazon.com associate. That was no big surprise as I haven't done a lot of maintenance on the site and haven't added a lot of content in the last years.

The only serious maintenance was for the migration to the new web server where php 7.0 is the standard version. I wish to some day migrate to perl but haven't found time yet.

So I removed all amazon affiliate links I could find. This also means I can't use the amazon.com API anymore.

Did some work on The Virtual Bookcase. First of all Amazon notified me that amazon web services was going to disable version 3 of the API which I was still using (yes, a year after the first notification that it was going to be ended .. not that much time for virtualbookcase at the moment). So time to do some PHP programming and redo the stuff for version 4. I also noticed that the bot for the russian search site Yandex was causing high amounts of hits but would not even return a direct link to www.virtualbookcase.com when searching on virtual bookcase at yandex. So I wanted to disable Yandex in robots.txt but I could not easily find the right name to put in robots.txt because all the help at Yandex is also in Russian. Finally I found some hints at this page describing robots.txt in russian that the right User-Agent probably is Yandex. And the robots.txt for cisco.com agrees.