10 posts tagged “giftlist”
Show us a sign that Christmas is a month away.
I'm working on GiftList, the socially networked shared wishlist service I created for my family to use each Christmas. Every year I try to add some significant new feature. Last year it was Amazon integration. This year, as you might expect, I've decided to create an iPhone interface for it. It's really not that hard, especially if you cheat and look at the css Walt created for the very nice Typepad iPhone app.
Tonight I made another major update to GiftList. You could call this phase 2 of the Amazon integration project. As you can see from the screenshot, GiftList now (gently) suggests when you claim a gift request that you purchase it from Amazon. If they do, of course, GiftList gets a cut via Amazon's affiliate program.
Hopefully GiftList users won't revolt and start a petition as a result of these changes. I'm trying to strike a balance between encouraging Amazon, but not requiring it. And using the power of guilt, of course.
Anyway, the reaction of the GiftList user community should be interesting. Fortunately most of the people in my familiy are economists, so they are more culturally amenable to this kind of thing than others might be.
Today I updated GiftList with the first stage of import wishlist. Here's what it looks like. To start, this is what my Amazon wishlist looks like. As you can see, Amazon has been adding a lot of features to their wishlist lately, perhaps feeling the heat from GiftList. See, competition is good.
So now, let's go to the giftlist listing screen to see that indeed the Amazon wishlist items have been imported successfully.
And there they are! Import successful.
The major limitation of the wishlist import right now is that it only fetches the first "page" of the Amazon wishlist (the most recent 8-10 items.) I tried implementing multi-page imports last night, but ran into some execution time-out issues because the REST/XML parsing was taking so long. However, I think that even with that limitation the feature is still useful because the most recent items are probably what the user most wants, anyway.
I now have the Amazon wishlist import code working, as you can see from this screenshot:
Unfortunately, I only seem to be able to pull eight wishlist items at a time. I need to figure out how pagination works with AWS REST calls. However, I'm optimistic I should be able to ship this feature by the end of the weekend, just in time for the prime holiday shopping season. Only fifteen shopping days until Christmas, including today.
Are you a re-gifter? Have you ever re-gifted?
Submitted by Sandals.
No, I think re-gifting is pretty lame. I can honestly say I've never done it. In an attempt to reduce the amount of superflouous gifting in the world, I created an online wishlist site called GiftList.net.
Tonight I updated GiftList.net with its first Amazon integration feature. Before I describe how the feature works, I have to give mad, mad props (do people still say "mad props"?) to aa for hooking me up with some XML parser code (as well as a very helpful debugging function) that allowed me to use AWS with php 4.4–otherwise I would have had to write that code myself, which would have been tedious and time-consuming. He saved me a lot fo work. Thanks Andrew!
And now, to the feature. Here are a sequence of screenshots showing it in action. First is the screen where you enter what you want to find. I paid a ui expert a thousand dollars to design this.
Once you click "Search" the resulting page displays the results retrieved from Amazon using a REST call.
Next step is to add an import Amazon wishlist feature.
This is what I have so far. Looks pretty nice. Unfortunately I tried uploading my pages up to my ISP where GiftList is hosted and it turns out they only have php 4.4 there, which lacks the SimpleXML extension. So now I have to figure out how to parse the XML manually, instead of using simplexml_load_string to map it to a nice php object. Sigh. Well, I'll have to tackle that tomorrow.
I can pull in search results with image links.
On the GiftList<->Amazon project. I programmed my first successful REST call.
So far what I've gleaned is that one major choice you have to make is whether to use REST or SOAP to call the Amazon web services. It seems for my purposes that REST may be the way to go since it involves less overhead. Anyone on Vox have an opinion on this subject?
