Amazon Central

As some may have noticed, our “Amazon Central” sidebar got a little boost. The previous version was hosted as a separate blog in Moveable Type. Each book was it’s own entry with various blog fields mapped to different attributes about the book: i.e. entry body => ISBN, keyword => are we still reading this?, etc. Not very intuitive, yet a common practice used by bloggers wishing to enhance existing tools.

If you want something done right, do it yourself… and have fun doing it.

Amazon Central is a Flash-based internet application integrated with WordPress and Amazon’s E-Commerce Web service that I created. Our collection of books is store in a mySQL database by ASIN, who’s reading it, and is it being read right now (its reading status). The accordion menu separates the collection into views by reading status. Each view displays up to 10 books. Ten is the maximum number of items you can request from Amazon in a single call. If there are more than 10 items in a view, the next and previous buttons will be enabled. Since we’ll only be reading a few books at a time, I decided to include images for the “Reading” view.

Now for the real magic.

What you don’t see is the admin form unless you are logged in to WordPress as an author. The image here shows that authors can add books to either view by simply entering it’s ASIN in the appropriate accordion menu. If the author wishes to change a book’s reading status from “Reading” to “Read”, or visa-versa, she would simply need to (un)check its checkbox. It’s that simple.

As before, clicking a book will take you to its entry on Amazon.com tied with our Associates tag. So remember – visit our site first before shopping at Amazon!