cogdogblog

Amazon RSS Feed-Builder

Although Boris recently blogged on a convoluted way to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com, there is a slicker interface from onfocus , the Amazon RSS Feed Builder.

This site is by "pb" or Paul Bausch, "co-developer" of Blogger and author of Amazon Hacks, so definitely no slouch at the programming command line.

It is the same princliple, applying an XSLT transformation on the XML data published by Amazon.com. (Now I just have to learn what the heck is XSLT!)

For example, here are the top selling books at Amazon.com using the keyword.... (drumroll please) "weblog".

BookWatch (web page view):
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/AmazonRss.asp?search=KeywordSearch&q=weblog&mode=books&sort=%2Bsalesrank

RSS:
http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=onfocus&dev-t=amznRss&KeywordSearch=weblog&mode=books&bcm=&type=lite&page=1&ct=text/xml&sort=+salesrank&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl

It just might mean it does not really manner how the standards are devised at a particular site if there are public tools like this to transform it to compatible flavors of RSS or whatever else we can dream up to connect content with.