davidgagne.net

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.

Replace your AWSAccessKeyId and your WishlistID (or anyone’s WishlistID) in this URL and you’ll get an RSS-ified version of your wishlist:

http://xml-us.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
&Version=2006-06-07
&AWSAccessKeyId=YOURAWSACCESSKEYID
&Operation=ListLookup
&ListType=WishList
&ListId=YOURWISHLISTID
&ResponseGroup=ItemAttributes,ListItems,ListInfo,Offers
&Sort=DateAdded
&Style=http://s3.amazonaws.com/amazon_xslt_files/ecs_to_rss-wishlist.xslt

Note that I added line-breaks. You’ll have to remove them to get this URL to work.

What’s cool is that you can use any xslt file to do your transformation. Just replace the one used in the example with one of your own. What is way not cool is that you have to have an “Amazon Web Services Access Key ID” in order to get to it. You’re not supposed to be making that key public, so you can’t really use it in a pipe. There must be a simpler way to get a wishlist as RSS…

The Yahoo! Pipe IDE is fairly nifty, although I think it’s going to be pretty scary to non-programmers. It only took me about twenty minutes to build my first pipe. It does half of what I want. I haven’t even started connecting it to eBay yet. But still. Cool stuff.

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