Associate-o-Matic? Annoy-O-Matic

associateomatic I like Wordpress. It has a ton of themes and options. It also has a lot of plugins, which can be used for all kinds of stuff-blocking spam, keeping track of recent comments, placing ads, and doing about a million other odds and ends that a blogger might want to do.

I keep thinking that I am going to make some money blogging one of these days, but I don’t really want to have to work too hard to do it. So I am often playing around with money making plugins designed to help sell one thing or another.

Associate-o-Matic is designed to turn a Wordpress blog into an Amazon affiliate store. Then, if all goes well, people come to your site and buy stuff and you get some commission money. This is a plugin that cost money, though I tried to use the free version. So it is not the run of the mill plugin that I am used to-in other words, it is bloody damned complicated and I could never get it to work.

A normal plugin requires that you download a file, unzip it, use an FTP program to transfer it to your host server, go to your control panel in Wordpress and active it, and then adjust the settings so that it will do what you want it to do. That’s the simple way to use plugins, and about half the time they don’t do what I wanted them to do anyway.

But hope springs eternal. So I saw the sample sites for Associate-o-matic and they look pretty good. Ok, they look like a place trying to sell you stuff from Amazon, but still, they look better than other sites I have seen doing the same thing. So I go and sign up and download the files and then I find out that this is not a normal plugin.

First off, I had a hell of a time just getting the thing installed. You don’t just copy files into the Plugin folder like you do with any other plugin. No, you have to add a couple files separately, then add a couple of separate folders, then make sure the folders are places they want to be and have the permissions they need to work. Then you don’t access it through Wordpress, but by using a separate call to a php file on your host server. After fighting with it for a few hours and reading endless forum discussion about the problem, I got the thing to install.

Which brought me to a screen like the one pictured. There are around 25 settings tabs, with each setting having dozens of options. None of which seem to make much sense and none of which I could get to do anything. After fiddling around for an hour or so I was able to add a few Categories, but when I went to my ’store’, there was nothing there. This seems to be a common problem, but there are no common solutions that I was able to find.

So after wasting a day or so I said to heck with it and deleted the files. Maybe a programmer could have figure it out, but it was well beyond me. I want my plugins to be easy-not to require a advanced degree in physics. Having them work would also be nice.