Amazon RSS - books delivered to your news aggregator!

Amazon RSS - books delivered to your news aggregator!
Sean Nolan
yaywastaken.com

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8/23/04 - Want a no-code-required widget to show Amazon products on your web pages? Take a look at blogtricks!

7/26/03 - Amazon knows genius when it sees it. :) You can now get RSS feeds directly from Amazon! While the Amazon format is less display-rich (no images or reviews, etc.), I'm planning to take this service down sometime in the next week or so to reclaim the bandwidth. If that freaks you out, let me know. If there's interest I'll keep it going, I guess.

5/9/03 - After you're done here, check out my new bargain-hunting feed experiment! Whoopie!

Another Amazon Web Services experiment. The idea is this: say you're interested in books about weblogs. Wouldn't it be nice to have an RSS feed for all weblog-related books at Amazon, so that when new books became available you'd know about them? Thanks to the magic of web pipelines (Amazon >> XML over HTTP >> XSLT >> ASP >> RSS >> Your News Aggregator), it's become a pretty trivial thing to put together.

If you don't know what a "news aggregator" or "RSS" is, I encourage you to check out this RSS Workshop. In a nutshell, a news aggregator is a piece of software that collects content from many sites and presents it to you in a single interface. One of the most popular aggregators is Radio Userland, and of course we're partial to KBnow, but there's a long list of free and commercial aggregators in the workshop link.

Anyway, You can create a feed by passing keywords to the following URL:

	http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=weblogs

Replace "weblogs" in the above example with your keywords, and remember to escape things properly for the URL. If you're not sure about URL escaping rules, you can use this little javascript tool to see how you should format your keywords.

Once you've subscribed to an Amazon RSS feed in your aggregator, you'll see books start to show up. Yay. But that's not the great part. Take a look at the list, buy any you like and clean them out. NOW it gets good. When a new item shows up at Amazon that matches your feed, it will automatically show up right alongside your morning news. Coolio!

This service will return at most 20 pages of results ... please try your query at Amazon first to be sure it returns what you think it will.

By default you'll get an RSS feed with "long" descriptions that include an image of the book and customer reviews. If your aggregator works better with short descriptions, you can add the parameter "&shortdesc=1" to the url, as in:

	http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=weblogs&shortdesc=1

Finally, you can also use the RSS generator to pull all items from an Amazon "browse category". To do this you pass a "browse" parameter instead of "keywords". For example, the url:

	http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?browse=1000

will return all books in Amazon's "Best Sellers" category. This one could be a lot of fun, but be careful! If your feed returns too many items it won't be very useful.

A number of people have asked for the source. As with the referrer stuff, it's just ASP. And there's a HUGE hack that I'm not super proud of and that someone with better XSL skills could probably avoid. But hey, here you go:

So there you go. No warranties or guarantees. But as always, just drop me a note if I can help with anything. Have fun! Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, note that I have hooked my Amazon affiliate code up to the links returned by the feed.

---S