I realized while adding my Amazon.com library to FriendFeed that I should share the mash-up I made to display the books on the right side. Even if you don’t care about the technologies — Wordpress, syndication, and mash-ups — you should at least read on to learn how the Internet is plugable.
The only advertising on this site is the Dead Trees feed on the right; this is a list of the book titles I have recently read and liked enough to pass along. I link them as an affiliate of Amazon.com.
Amazon.com won’t give me a feed of my books to do something like this, so I had to make my own.
So
I signed up for a Google Books account. Here I simply keep a library of the titles I want to include. Google gives me this library as a feed (thank you).
Then I wrote a Yahoo Pipe to create a feed from the Google Books data adding in Amazon.com affiliate links where appropriate. The Yahoo Pipe is publicly available here. Be sure to bring your Google Books Export RSS feed URL, RSS feed URL, and Amazon.com affiliate ID to play along.
The last thing required was to install the KB Advanced RSS Widget. The Widget has a syntax to dictate the appearance of a feed’s data. Here is what I’m using right now to get the list on this page:
<li><center><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="^link$"><img src="^guid$" alt="^title$" title="^title$" height="80"></a><br /><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="^link$" title="^title$">^title$</a><br />^author$</center></li>
With those pieces talking to each other, all around the Internet, I only have to add a book to my Google Books account to have it automagically appear — Amazon.com link and all — on igudo.
Why couldn’t Amazon.com do the feed legwork for me?
