Andrew Jung points out that Bell's phone listing for BC and Alberta is at least a year out of date. Apparently I need to get onto the Superpage database. This is stupid and annoying.
How can Bell not have up to date phone listings? Don't these damn phone companies talk to each other? FFS...
Note to self - stop swearing in acronyms...
1:22:28 PM
Ian and I were talking about how great it is that Chapters/Indigo and Amazon have a nice little price war going on.
Who really buys books at Indigo anyway? I always see people coming in, drinking a coffee, and then leaving without any arms full of books.
Amazon provide a pretty amazing API to build programs against - Ian and I were figuring that it would be cool to see a little program do searches for books, and stick Amazon and Chapters side by side to see who does best deals.
The saying "web stores only have 1 click before the customer goes elsewhere" would be reduced to 0 clicks.
As I was rolling a little Sherlock channel to pit the book stores against each other - I noticed that :
Chapters/Indigo has no web services API
nor do they generate anything that even remotely bears any resemblence to conformant HTML much less XHTML.
There's no bloody way to parse Indigo. I'm amazed that my browser can render the bloody thing at all. A lack of an API is fine - but pages that don't even CODE GENERATE the same way? FFS!
My pet theory on this is that Indigo does not want real competition to happen. The fallout would be commodity pricing on books - and as much as people make fun of Amazon - they at least are profitable on their book division.
