10.13. Having Amazon Produce Its Own RSS FeedsAndrew Odewahn, an editor at O'Reilly, spotted how you can have Amazon.com produce RSS feeds from any search within its own site. So, he says:
To do this, you only need play with a URL. The URL for an RSS 0.91 feed of a keyword search for "software engineering" is:
As you can see, this is actually calling the Amazon web services system and then formatting it by passing it through an XSLT stylesheet. Andrew goes on to say,
To do this, scroll over the URL until you see the "&sort=+salesrank" part. To change the sort order, replace "salesrank" with the option you'd prefer. Here's a list of possible options found on Amazon's Web Services page, http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html:
So, to get a feed of all the new books published in Software Engineering, just replace "salesrank" with "daterank" and click update. From now on, you easily see all the new stuff coming out in one place. For example:
produces a feed of the books I have written, in order of price. This technique highlights a very good point: it is well worth looking at complex URLs quite carefully: they're invariably hackable. |