A while back I rigged up a little ad server to serve Amazon “ads” to our web sites. I wrote it up so that I could easily reuse it for different projects and have a central location for managing it rather than write the code, duplicate it across projects and then have to maintain it all.

Amazon has an affiliate program which earns you from 4% to 10% commissions on purchases done from traffic you drive to Amazon’s web site. You earn money on sales made during a shopping session that weren’t on the item you linked to, too. Like most affiliate programs, the more you sell in a given month, the higher your percentage commission.

My blogs and the web sites I’m working on are all focussed on particular areas. So, for Apocalypse Blog, I put together a list of apocalyptic media available via Amazon and use my ad server to display a random item on each pageview of the blog.

The problem? I embed the ad by using an HTML iframe to contain it. Unfortunately, its positioning is a bit off. As you may be able to tell, the iframe is shifted down and to the right just a bit.
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So I had my Wordpress theme worked out using the “3 Column Fluid Layout” that I mentioned in an earlier article, and I tested it with Safari, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 6 and it looked the way it should. I skimped on testing it with Internet Explorer 7 because I didn’t have space on my MacBook Pro for another Parallels disk image for IE 7. So, of course, it worked poorly with IE 7.

What was I thinking? What, IE 7 might have a bug?

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