Amazon

The PicoPad® is pure genius. It’s a pad of sticky notes — with a tiny pen — in a case the size of a credit card that you can easily slip it into your wallet. The PicoPad and its refills are also incredibly inexpensive. I am always scribbling notes on the backs of business cards and receipts in my wallet, so this is a product near and dear to my heart. My girlfriend gave me one last week and I’ve already used it several times.

I love books, for example, and can’t enter a bookstore without finding more than a few that I am dying to read. Instead of spending megabucks at the brick and mortar, though, here’s what I do: I jot down the ISBN and then, when I get home, find the title at Amazon. If I simply must have it, I’ll grab a used copy there for much, much less. Otherwise I add it to my wishlist for a rainy day.

Today I decided that my life would not be complete if I didn’t learn how to use Yahoo! Pipes. So I gave it a shot. I couldn’t really think of anything I wanted in a pipe, so I decided to try building one that would let me search eBay for items on my Amazon wishlist. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

I learned that it is possible to pull your Amazon Wishlist items as an RSS feed, which is cool. I found an example on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. You need to have an Amazon Web Services Access Key (AWSAccessKeyId), but they’ll give those away to anyone nowadays. You don’t need to read the full article; I’ll summarize.

[click to continue...]

When I got to the office today there was a package sitting on my desk. I received my sixth copy of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” — I keep giving them away! — via Amazon’s used book marketplace. The book is in near-perfect condition, perhaps because it seems to have been stolen from the Naperville, Illinois Public Library. Either someone stole the book from the library and then sold it on Amazon, a Naperville Public Library employee is stealing books and selling them on Amazon, or the administrators of the Naperville Public Library are knowingly reselling their library books on Amazon. I don’t think that stealing library books is a crime that any police department seriously enforces, so people could presumably make quite a bit of money stealing library books and posting them for sale on Amazon. How odd.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! This is when everyone starts asking me, “So what do you want for Christmas?” Every year my answer is the same. “I don’t really want anything. I need cash. If you have a burning desire to buy me a gift, check out my Amazon wishlist.” To make it easier on you, I’ve embedded the little Amazon widget right here.

Here’s something you probably can’t get me, but I’d really like. Someone somewhere should give me a link I can click to automatically add all the college bowl games to my Outlook calendar. That would be oh-so handy. Why hasn’t anyone done that yet? Is it even possible to have a single object that imports multiple calendar items? Why isn’t ESPN working on this?

I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

The chances of me ever using the WordPress str QuickTag are pretty slim, so I replaced it with a drop-capper. (The T in this paragraph should appear as a dropcap for you if you’re using a browser that handles CSS properly.)

Pretty nifty, I think.

Want to do it?

[click to continue...]

I wanted to add nifty little Amazon links to my posting window … so I did. Grab my zipped version of quicktags.js and you can, too. This is the javascript file that builds the row of buttons above your posting window (e.g. str, em, del, etc.) My version adds two buttons: one for quick-linking to an item at Amazon via its ASIN and one for quick-linking to an Amazon search.

[click to continue...]

Note to hep-cat Amazon employees: “Perl the programming language” <> “Pearl Jam the rock band”.

Y’know what I want? I want to be able to click anything, anywhere, and add it to my amazon.com wishlist. (Note that that is a link to a Google Search on the term “amazon wishlist” and not another shameless plug for my own wishlist.) Like this pendrive, f’rinstance. What a great little toy! I want one. I really, really want one. But I don’t have the cash right now to buy one. And I don’t want to forget about. Is someone at amazon working on this? Dan? I’d think they’d be all over that. Click here, click there, click anywhere. I’m not even restricting this to the web, either. I want to be able to click on a CD at my friend’s house and add it to my wishlist, too. I want to be able to click without, say, having to be sitting at my computer. Dig? Is someone working on that?

Well that was fun. Way back in March I implemented the PowerLinks MT hack from scottandrew.com. When I upgraded to MT2.11 I lost the hack, of course. So I re-hacked it. I played with it a bit and added a few more features.

• One thing I have wanted to do since day one was add the same PowerLinks to my bookmarklet, since that’s how I post 3/4 of the time anyway. So I did that by editing bm_entry.tmpl a bit.
• I hacked around with the end of edit_entry.tmpl so that I could use the PowerLinks in the “Additional Entry” section as well as the “Main Entry Text” box.
• I changed some of the formatting (width=”whatever” to width=”50%”) so that the buttons wouldn’t be aligned too far to the right of the textboxes.
• And finally I added a new PowerLink button to automatically link to a specific item at Amazon.com instead of just a search for the item.

Amazing, I know, but it all works perfectly. If anyone is interested I’ll see if Scott minds if I write a quick and dirty tutorial about how I did it. Mr. Andrew certainly deserves all the credit for it, though.

This is kind of interesting: If you go to Amazon.com and submit a request to be notified when Raiders of the Lost Ark is released on DVD, it will - allegedly - be considered a “vote” for the release. Amazon.com states that they’ll “let the studio know how many customers are waiting for this title.” I wonder if that means they eMail someone at LucasFilm or Paramount. Do you really think anything happens? Do you really think either of those studios is influenced by my vote at Amazon.com? Hmmm …
[click to continue...]

Hey! TheBrad just noticed that Amazon.com’s wishlist system is failing bloggers. If you try to click on someone else’s wishlist, Amazon displays your own wishlist instead (if you have one). That means that since I have a wishlist there, I can’t see anyone else’s! The hell? What did they change? Has anyone else found a way around this problem?

(with a <grin> and a <wink>)
Aside 1: It sure would be nice if TheBrad had a comment system.
Aside 2: It sure would be nice if TheBrad had permalinks to individual entries.

I have to see if there’s a way to add this pen to my Christmas wishlist. I love cool pens. There are dozens of really awesome ones at Levenger. If you love pens as much as I do, check out the Fisher Bullet Space Pen. It fits in your pocket (and anywhere else!) and is one of my favorites.

Greetings from Amazon.com.
We thought you’d like to know that we shipped your items today, and that this completes your order.
Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com, and we hope to see you again soon.