Linking to an Amazon.com browse node is as easy as linking to an individual item. The URL to use is:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fb%3Fie%3DUTF8%26node%3DBROWSENODEID&tag=ASSOCIATESID
Where ASSOCIATEID is your Associates ID and BROWSENODEID is the Browse Node ID. You can find Browse Nodes IDs using BrowseNodes.com. The ID is the number which identifies the browse node.
The URL above will take the vistor to the Amazon.com page for the selected browse node. There are a few browse nodes, however, which won't be correctly displayed using the URL so be sure to test the links you add to your site.
You may have noticed that BrowseNode.com's "[View HTML]" links have URLs like:
http://www.browsenodes.com/more/browse-283155.html
This URL actually redirects to a URL like the first one which takes the visitor to Amazon.com. This is accomplished using Apache's "Rewrite Rule" feature in BrowseNode.com's .htaccess file. The .htaccess file (in the more directory) contains:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^more/browse-(.*)\.html$ http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8\%26node=$1\%26tag=browsetest-20 [R=permanent,L,NE]
This technique makes it easy to build links to browse nodes. It's much easier to remember "http://www.browsenodes.com/more/browse-BROWSENODEID.html" than the longer URL. The shorter URL is also more "search engine friendly" (or would be except I put it in a directory excluded from search engines using a robots.txt file) and less likely to wrap if used in an email message. It's also less likely to be filtered by "ad-blocker" software.
Note: the URLs and .htaccess example above will probably wrap when displayed. The URLs, of course, are each one line. The last line of the .htacess example begins with "RewriteRule."
