Overstock.com RSS --- bargains for your News Aggregator!
Sean Nolan
yaywastaken.com
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1/7/2006 - Overstock has changed the format of their pages and these feeds are no longer functional. I've left the code here for those who might like to use it for sample code.

You can get an updated, current list of Overstock's best deals by RSS here: http://www.blogtricks.com/ads/overtoprss.php.

Another yaywastaken syndication experiment. Basically I now rely on my aggregator for most of my daily surfing --- news, blogs, comic strips, you name it. It's just a great format for quickly getting the big picture every morning ... I "miss" far less than I used to when I relied on my memory to round-robin through the sites I care about.

Anyways, buying stuff is something I do a lot of as well --- too much, some might say. I'm particularly fond of sites like Overstock.com that have relatively random stuff cheap --- if any of you grew up around Boston, it all started with Building #19.

The experiment is this: can I integrate bargain-hunting smoothly into my aggregator habit? We'll see ... I've built feeds for the "buyer recommended" items in each of the main departments at Overstock.com (disclosure: my affiliate id is on these links for tracking, and if I get rich then woo-hoo) ... they'll change each day to match what is on the site. I've chosen to include rich descriptions because it seemed more interesting that way; we'll see how it works. Let me know what you think!

Give it a try... use the "subscribe" buttons below to easily integrate the feeds you care about into your own aggregator:

  • Electronics & Computers
    		•
  • Books, Movies, CDs, Games
    		•
  • Home & Garden
    		•
  • Jewely, Watches & Gifts
    		•
  • Sports, Travel & Toys
    		•
  • Apparel, Shoes & Accessories
    		•

    For the technically-curious, there were some interesting challenges here ... really they all revolved around the Linkshare affiliate program model. Unlike Amazon, with Linkshare programs you need to use their widgets to build product links --- they generate magic codes and the like. So basically to build the feeds I had to force the feed to masquerade at Linkshare as a real person and go through their link builder for each product I found ... then the links aren't "ready" for an hour, so I built in a priming mechanism that fires around 1am each day. Not the most elegant, but a lot of fun to work through.

    Enjoy! And be sure to check out my other crap: Amazon RSS, yaywastaken, Link Feedback, and my day job at Software Poetry.

    ---S