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Tuesday - July 16th, 2002
API Convergence: BookPost

Amazon released their new Web Services today. As an experiment, I put together a little tool for weblog authors called BookPost. It uses Amazon's new Web Services along with the Blogger API. BookPost assembles all of the HTML involved with linking to any given book on Amazon (and/or using an image of the book cover); which lets you focus on posting about the book. You can either enter an ISBN, or click on it as a bookmarklet from any Amazon.com product page. Let me know what you think! If you have any ideas about how to improve it, bugs to report, or ways to make the process easier, send them my way. Here are the bookmarklet and details. (with screenshots!)

If you'd rather skip the instructions and start playing around, here's the link:

Bookmarklet: BookPost (drag to your toolbar)
[.] posted at 7:50 PM

Comments
Awesome work, man. Can you imagine how many hours we'd have saved if this API had been out a few years ago?
[.] posted by Anil on 7/16/2002 at 10:13 PM
Thanks, Anil. heh, no kidding. I have an entire library of Amazon scraping scripts that are now obsolete. It's like when CDs came out...suddenly your record collection was worthless.
[.] posted by pb on 7/16/2002 at 10:22 PM
Yeah, awesome tool! But there's a little problem with scandivanian letters like auml and ouml (hope you understand). Could this be fixed easily?
[.] posted by Comrad on 7/17/2002 at 11:41 PM
At what point in the process are you noticing the character troubles?
[.] posted by pb on 7/18/2002 at 12:49 AM
In the BookPost textfield characters are allright, but after I have posted they look very weird in my blog.
[.] posted by Comrad on 7/18/2002 at 10:44 PM
hmm...I don't think I can control how the characters appear on the other end. I'll see if there's anything I can do on this end to improve things. The XML transport to your weblog tool is probably wreaking havoc on them. Maybe I can CDATA the problem away. :)
[.] posted by pb on 7/18/2002 at 11:21 PM
thank you for making available such as great utility!
[.] posted by andrea on 7/24/2002 at 4:31 AM
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