Why Does Everyone Think Amazon.com is so Cutting Edge?
October 8, 2007
I see people here and there talking about all of Amazon’s Web services and how spiffy they are and A9 Search and OMG Seattle rocks and books and Web 2.0 and and, but, really, as a boring old end user all I want WANT WANT is a bloody RSS feed of my Wish List. If anyone can figure out why there’s no RSS for this, I’ll buy you a beer. Just as likely: if there actually is an RSS feed buried someone in there, let me know and I’ll, yeah, buy you a beer.
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Is this what you’re looking for:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=379
RSS? Hey, when they don’t even have decent search functionality …
this site has a simple form to generate lists/css as well:
http://www.edazzle.net/amazon/
I’ll never be first in the “Amazon is awesome” line, but I’m confused here. I’m not sure if your “Wish List” link up there was supposed to go to your actual one, but when I search for your wish list, I do find an RSS feed (XML) of items you’ve added, ranked in reverse chronological order.
Is that what you wanted? Did they add it in the three days it took me to respond? (Sorry, forgot to add your new site’s RSS feed to my reader. Is that an ironic twist?)
Todd, I owe you a beer, but, seriously, WHERE THE HELL IS THAT LINK on that page? I feel soundly stupid.
Ooh, someone‘s quick to approve comments! I don’t know why my paragraph breaks aren’t working, though. Do I have to insert my own <br />s?
obTopical: your alter ego likes kites.
Well, there’s one of them orange radar-signal icons in the upper-right section of the page, before the wish list begins, underneath the wish list search box. But I found it using Firefox’s RSS autodiscovery — the same icon just appears in the URL bar.
Also, is it a bit pushy to note the lack of top or bottom margins on <p>s in your comments? You can see what’s going on in my previous comments.
Yeah, lemme check the styles.
Soooooo…believe me or don’t believe me, BUT I see neither the icon inline nor in my URL bar (I use FireFox too…and I’ve searched the page source etc. etc. and I canNOT find it).
Todd: margins fixed. This is not the first CSS fix I’ve had to make to this theme–it also started with justified text, which was nauseating. As soon as I find some actual time I’m going to rip this thing to pieces.
Well, I was so intrigued I made my own wish list, much as I don’t like Amazon or wish lists personally.
Yup, turns out Amazon, in its wisdom, has decided that the list creator doesn’t need to know about their own RSS feed. I looked at the same wish list URL[1] in two different browsers, one logged in and one logged out of Amazon[2], and the latter one showed me the RSS icon (and also appeared to autodiscover the feed, though since it was IE7, it didn’t do so as obtrusively as Firefox would have).
[1] Oddly, I couldn’t find my own wish list when searching for it, even after making it public. Dunno why. Amazon is awful?
[2] Logging out wasn’t at all obvious, either. I guess Amazon doesn’t think I want to do that, either. After poking around a bit, I clicked on the link that said “If you’re not Todd Stadler, click here”. It didn’t tell me it would log me out, but I guessed right anyhow. Grrr…