Amazon RSS Feed Builder

Amazon didn't really let people know how to add feeds to their newsreader so I whipped up a page that can get you started: Amazon RSS Feed Builder. You can build Book, DVD, or CD feeds with this little tool. Just choose a category or enter a keyword and you'll get the URL for the feed. Then you can copy the feed URL and paste it into your newsreader. If the RSS looks good (ie. has items), you should also get a preview of the feed so you can see what's in it. The feed builder hasn't been tested too much so let me know if you run into problems.

Here are some RSS feed URLs I built with this tool (that I'll be monitoring): Try it out: Amazon RSS Feed Builder.

Update: The feed preview is a bit sketchy—so even if it says there aren't any items, check the feed manually to see if that's true.
⌨ posted Jul 28th, 2003 at 11:18 am

Comments

Are the movie showtimes on Amazon accessible by RSS? Messing around with urls, I can get a keyword search for theatrical titles:
http://tinyurl.com/ig8w

and a form of the Now Showing page:
http://tinyurl.com/ig8x

but I can't figure out getting the actual showtimes in the feed.
by David Han on July 29th, 2003 at 3:33 pm
Nice work on finding the theatrical mode, it's undocumented afaik! They don't offer the showtimes via web services; so you can't create an RSS feed with this method. The closest you can come is writing a script to scrape the times, create the feed, and run it as a cron job.

You can always lobby the AWS team to add it, though. Movie showtimes are perfect for RSS.
by pb on July 29th, 2003 at 3:43 pm
btw, I truncated your URLs with tinyurl.com. (Please the visit the URL to see how he changed the mode= value to "theatrical")
by pb on July 29th, 2003 at 3:47 pm
Fantastic, media geeks everywhere are singing your praises.
by fakane on July 29th, 2003 at 6:27 pm