Oct
27
Well, I've finally decided that with the desire for librarians to see book (or any library item) cover art on the website because it's "cool" or "flashy", I'll need to use some sort of automatic ability to pull those images. There's also a huge desire to see book reviews, but we can't integrate them directly into our catalog system as it is now, so...looks like I'll also need a way to automatically pull them from somewhere else. Ok, where's that leave me? AMAZON! It's the first place I could think of, and is known far and wide as an excellent provider for a web-service API. Works for me.
I'll have to report back on whether or not I can get it to work the way I want it to. I'm afraid I might have to use AJAX to pull in reviews, and I really don't want to (I don't like JS, and therefore don't know it all that well). I'd rather just link to Amazon's own review page, but simply pull the book cover art with the API.
Oh yeah...it's amazing how much librarians love PDF files for the web. They can create a document in whatever program they want and export it as a single portable format...and although it does have its merits, their PDF files end up being larger than a single floppy disk can handle (2.4MB). Considering the memory requirements for Acrobat as it is, plus the download time, my browser wants to choke itself, and I'm on the same network. They just don't understand, I try to educate them, and it doesn't work. I wish I had more time to educate more, and if incapable, convert them to HTML and make it look prettier to make them happy. They seem to like "pretty".
I'll have to report back on whether or not I can get it to work the way I want it to. I'm afraid I might have to use AJAX to pull in reviews, and I really don't want to (I don't like JS, and therefore don't know it all that well). I'd rather just link to Amazon's own review page, but simply pull the book cover art with the API.
Oh yeah...it's amazing how much librarians love PDF files for the web. They can create a document in whatever program they want and export it as a single portable format...and although it does have its merits, their PDF files end up being larger than a single floppy disk can handle (2.4MB). Considering the memory requirements for Acrobat as it is, plus the download time, my browser wants to choke itself, and I'm on the same network. They just don't understand, I try to educate them, and it doesn't work. I wish I had more time to educate more, and if incapable, convert them to HTML and make it look prettier to make them happy. They seem to like "pretty".
