Dragging links from Amazon; have I gone crazy?

[rickl]

I tend to go through flurries of using Bookpedia and then fairly long periods when I don't launch it. Pretty much everytime I revisit the program, there's an update, which I find impressive.

I've recently gone up to 3.3.1 and I'm now unable to drag amazon.com or amazon.co.jp links from Safari into Bookpedia and have the program load the book's details. If I were a constant user, I could say "Until 3.3.0, I was able to drag links into Bookpedia, but that was broken in 3.3.1", but I find myself wondering whether I just imagined that ability. As I remember it, I could drag from Safari's address bar when on the amazon sites, or items in Amazon search results pages.

Isn't this how it used to work? And if so what's gone wrong?

[Nora]

The URL drag into Bookpedia should work as usual. Make sure you're dragging the URL into the table view in Bookpedia and that you're dragging the fav icon (the little icon in the URL bar) not the writing.
If the problem continues, could you send us (or post here) a few URLs that aren't working for you so we can try them out? Thanks.

[Conor]

Do send us some sample URLs. Sometimes it's not things that change in Bookpedia but Amazon changing their URLs.

[rickl]

Thanks for the help. It seems that the problem was simply that I've recently got into the habit of using cover view, whereas before I always used table view. Switching back to table view solved the problem.

However, I've noticed that Amazon Japan has started using kanji in URLs for non-book products. Let's hope they don't spread that to book titles, because I imagine that would cause some problems. Check out this one:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/ROCKRIDGESOUND- ... 000HPBTYO/

[Conor]

We noticed the cover view did not respond to drags as well after you mentioned it and it is fixed for the next version. All Amazon sites have taken to sometimes adding the title of the product to the URL; however it shouldn't affect the dragging as we look for common patterns that indicate the ASIN, in this case the "dp" prefix indicates an ASIN is coming. The different patterns we look for are:

/exec/obidos/ASIN/**********/
exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/**********/
/gp/product/images/**********/
gp/product/customer-images/**********/
/gp/product/**********/
/dp/**********/
/ASIN/**********/