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Does it work in the sidebar on Pages, too?

Posts have tags, pages don’t, so it doesn’t work on those by default. But there’s a plugin called tags4page that enables tags for pages. Works like a charm.

Is there a limit of how many items can be requested?

Yes, Amazon has a limit of 10 items per request. Since they are separate requests, you can use a maximum of 10 items in the content plus a maximum of 10 in the sidebar.

Would it be possible to cache the images?

Technically it wouldn’t be a problem, but the Amazon Product Advertising API license explicitly forbids caching of images (see 5.1.10). Sorry.

I need to a larger thumbnail (medium), but can’t seem to find a place to edit the size of the image being requested.

The image size can be edited in the XSLT. The original result is a XML file that is transformed by Amazon using your local copy of amtap-html-sidebar.xsl and amtap-html-content.xsl, respectively. Replacing every occurance of .//aws:TinyImage with .//aws:MediumImage in lines 73-83 should do the trick.

You can view the original XML when you activate the “debug” option in the admin interface so that the request string is printed as a comment in the sidebar’s source code. XSLT is a very powerful tool, and there’s a lot more in the XML, for example customer reviews.

= Getting an error about “private IP address space”?

The error message means you are running the blog on something like localhost. Amazon Web Services needs to get an XML file from your server, obviously that is impossible when it’s not located on a server that can be accessed with a public IP address from the outside.

Are all options really required?

No. The only required fields are the Amazon Web Services Access Key ID and your Secret Access Key. You can leave the others, they are set to defaults then.