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.

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.