Interactive Llama

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how?

Originally I used Roblog’s WordPress Plugin, Now Reading, It’s truly a great plug-in. You can search Amazon for your book and grab the information. It has Now Reading, Have Read and Planned Reading sections. You can rate your books and write reviews. I discovered early on that I was not interested in writing reviews of the books. The other drawback was that it was locked into one blog. I placed it my Cultured Media blog where I list the podcasts and media that I listen to. I wanted to place my current reading in the sidebar or the footer of all my blogs–and why stop there? Why not Facebook, too? The other problem is that I didn’t want to search for the name of the book on Amazon, then log into my blog and paste the name into Now Reading to add it.

Portable list of information that can be subscribed to from multiple locations? Sounds like RSS feeds to me. I found an Amazon Wish List import for Yahoo! Pipes. It did an XML look-up on any public wish list and then published the information you wanted. I cloned it to my Pipes page, and soon found out it was an old version of Amazon Web Services. After a few hours spent parsing, the new version 4 web services offering from Amazon, I was good to go.

The limitation of my Amazon-Yahoo! Pipes RSS lookup is that you can only grab one page of items at a time. This isn’t a problem for my use. I didn’t want more than 10 items anyway.

Once, you have your pipes set up, then use FeedList to display your RSS feed from Yahoo! Pipes. An example of this is at the bottom of my blog. When I want to update my reading list, I add an item to my Amazon Wish List. And there’s nothing to limit this process to books. Whatever you add your Amazon Wish List will show up in the feed–not only books.