Saturday, April 20, 2002

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "amazon" hasn't been defined.] Punk - Sassy candy-punk [Best of Emergent Music] And we love it! We also love the Best of Emergent Music blog and the accompanying RSS feed (Radio users, subscribe now!).  Many, many thanks (as usual!) to The Shifted Librarian  for pointing out the Emergent Music feed. 11:25:58 PM

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "amazon" hasn't been defined.] We've always had soft spots in our hearts for Johnette Napolitano's voice and the music of Concrete Blonde, so we were ecstatic when we saw that the trio have reunited to produce a new album, Group Therapy, their first since Mexican Moon. Once we had it home and in the CD player, we weren't disappointed.  Napolitano's voice, James Mankey's guitar, and Harry Rushakoff's drums are as finely honed as ever.  The seven-year break since these three last recorded together has, we think, put a patina of experience on their music -- a layer of knowing-about-the-world that almost, but not quite, crosses over into world-weariness. This is an album that is going to get a lot of play in the Bonzo household. 4:48:29 PM

But what we really want is one of these: [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "amazon" hasn't been defined.] 4:12:11 PM

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "amazon" hasn't been defined.] I've got my scripts working to produce an Amazon item image linked to the the Amazon item page. My macro call looks like this: <%amazon.macros.linkedItemImage("Colson Whitehead Intuitionist","0385493002")%> but I'm still playing with the scripts to get it "just right." (By the way, it's a great book.) 3:35:38 PM

We know that Dave has grave reservations about working with the Amazon API, and we share his "no more pesos for Señor Bezos" ideology to a small degree.  Nonetheless, we here at the Boulder Inquisition always enjoy new toys, and this certainly qualifies. The first thing we did was to follow Rogers Cadenhead's script for viewing amazon bestsellers in the news aggregator.  Nice, but not exactly what we had in mind.  (We're thinking we'd like to use the interface to include cover shots [with affiliate links, of course] for books, music, movies that we discuss over in Bonzo I/O.) So, what to do?  What we've learned tonight is that Radio is painfully easy to learn how to script.  With Rogers' code and Dave's googlebox script in front of us, we've made it about halfway towards creating a macro that will make the call to Amazon and munge the XML that gets returned into something useful. Along the way, we figured out a moderately clever way to get that item-specific information we were wanting.  We just perform a bestsellers-by-keywords search that includes the ISBN or ASIN code as one of the search terms: (example) (Atta boy, Bonzo!) 3:14:07 AM