Amazon Rank Widget
Mike Potter encouraged me with his post about The Most Popular Flex or Actionscript Book to build an online Amazon Ranking application. I wanted to know if he was using an existing tool to do this or if he was doing it manually. Sure enough, Mike replied that every month he would visit each of the product pages and put the rank result into an Excel spreadsheet.
I emailed him back saying that I was interested in creating an online app that would streamline the process via Amazon’s Ecommerce Service. He replied with encouragement to create a Flex widget that could be placed on a webpage that would show some books sorted in their Sales Rank order. The user would be able to see an image of each item as well as click on it to go the Amazon detail page. The owner of the website would specify the list of ASINs or ISBNs in an XML file for the widget to lookup.
I am very very new to Flex and have only been working with it on a project at work for a few weeks. This afternoon, I couldn’t wait to take on Mike Potter’s suggestion in beginning the work of this widget. What I am showing below is obviously not what the widget is going to look like but rather just the basic code that pulls a list of ASINs from an XML file and looks them all up on Amazon and displays them here.
Great start!
How about making this code open source, maybe on riaforge, so others can contribute and use it on their site?
Mike
Good idea! I think I shall. I’ve been needing an excuse to put something up there.
Hi Kyle,
What would be good is to allow someone to click on a book and be directed to Amazon.
Rey…
That is in the plans, Rey
Sweet! Then I might be motivated to actually buy a Flex book!
)
Rey, you’re never going to buy a Flex book
This is slick Kyle. Thanks for putting it together!
haha! Little do you know that I’ve been looking at reviews for Flex books on Amazon!
)
BTW, where’s my poster, Flex boy! ;o)
I’m not sure what the hold-up is…as said in http://www.fotoclubmattersburg.info and http://www.lahey.info maybe they have re-thought their stance on how this is going to actually make the company any money. Or perhaps their lawyers pointed out the liability of providing agents a platform to stick their feet in their mouth. Whatever it is, it’s hardly something I’d claim as being "Well done".