A Few Nights of Hacking Produces Reading Radar
Earlier this month, developer and mashup extraordinaire John Herren released Reading Radar, a mashup that combines the New York Times Bestseller's API with Amazon's API, and created a simple, purposeful site dedicated to listing the popular books on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Using various open source technologies such as jQuery, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Maintainable Framework, Reading Radar lets you scan the New York Times top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Times and Amazon sites.
The New York Times released their API on January 27; Herren had Reading Radar up by February 3. As the Programmable Web points out "This mashup serves as a great example of how emerging and mature APIs can be used to rapidly develop a functional and useful mashup."
Inspired by the release of The New York Times Best Sellers API, Herren decided to try and create a site that could be on "auto-pilot."
"I designed the site to use extensive caching of the NYT and Amazon APIs to minimize remote calls, but update the data often enough so that the information would be fresh."
The Maintainable Framework and the Zend framework provided a means to create the PHP based site, and jQuery, the popular JavaScript library along with YUI were used to present the data and provide the user interaction.
"The NYT API was simple enough to use. The REST API offers three response formats, XML, JSON, or serialized PHP. I did find a bug in the API, and was very pleased how reactive the NYT API team was to resolve the problem. Kudos!" Herren wrote on his blog.
If you're interested in more technical details, take a look at Herren's post announcing the release.
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He will earn a lot with affiliate links!
LOL... Lots of connections
Is this within the NYT terms?! It's got affiliate links and the terms call for non-commercial use only, don't they?
"YOU SHALL NOT ... use the NYT APIs for any commercial purpose." Doesn't that include advertisements and affiliate links!?
Don't get me wrong. It's a great hack, but it's also one many others would have done if we hadn't looked at the legal text and decided it was flat-out prohibited.
I'm asking the NYT for clarification. I'd love to add this to my site too.
What's up RWW? Out of ideas???
Sure I didn't came to RWW to see a coverage on ReadingRader.... duh:-p
Fatigue or bad economy?
I am very pleased to read the article in your Blog.
It gives me new knowledge has come very grateful.