Interactive Llama

I enjoy reading books. Most of the time, I read non-fiction. I don’t have anything against fiction. My wife reads fiction, but it’s not my cup of tea, unless its a classic. Whatever you read, you would probably like to share it with your friends. Now it’s easy. With these steps you can tweet about your latest book by simply adding the book to an Amazon Wishlist. No figuring out how much of the title you can post within the 140 character limit. No creating a TinyURL for the Amazon product page. A few hours later your twitter account will tweet your book addition!

Amazon WishList to RSS feed

To create my WordPress Reading List and my Twitter Reading List, I start with an Amazon Wishlist. Why? Because I (and probably you) read the largest list of book reviews, before you either buy the book or go to pick it up from the library. So now using my Amazon Wishlist to RSS Pipe you have an RSS feed of your Reading list.

RSS feed to Twitter tweet

At first, I was dismayed when I heard about TwitterFeed.  My gut reaction was: What idiot would place a bot within their feed? The whole point of Twitter is to have one on one personal interaction with actual people. Recently, I’ve been moving away from that view. Bots are helpful if not over-used. I update my book reading list: Stephen M James: Books (Planning or have read) just a few times a month. Not enough to make my followers annoyed. After all, reading books is a part of my online persona that I’d like to share. In order implement your own Twitter Reading List:

1. Visit Yahoo! Pipes and clone Amazon Wishlist to RSS Pipe and enter your settings into it.
2. Publish your pipe and copy the URL of the RSS feed.
3. Log into TwitterFeed (you will have to share your Twitter credentials with TwitterFeed) and create a TwitterFeed from your Pipe RSS
4. Add your book reading list into an Amazon wishlist.

For your TwitterFeed prefix I recommend “Will read #book soon: ” so that your tweet will end up in the hash tag twitter search for #book. You have a maximum of 20 characters for the prefix, so make it worth it. Twitterfeed will shorten the name of the book and add a tinyURL to the end that links to the Amazon page (hopefully with your affiliate tag–although you are more than welcome to use mine!) You might be interested in my post, Create a reading list in WordPress from Amazon Wish List using Yahoo! Pipes, It’s about using pipes to create an RSS from an Amazon Wishlist and pulling your reading list into WordPress.