6 posts tagged “amazon.com”

Let me get right to the point: Amazon's Unbox video download service, which can now transfer shows to your TiVo, is unexpectedly good. If you have a Series2 or Series3 TiVo box, you can buy or rent movies from Amazon's web site and they will be downloaded to your TiVo and appear in your Now Playing list just like regular stuff you've recorded.

That basic functionality works without any issues. What impressed me was how well it handles situations in which things go wrong. At some point during the one of the downloads, the network connection came loose from the back of the TiVo. Unfortunately, I didn't figure that out until about a week later. But Amazon was responsive and helpful when I contacted them saying I had a problem, letting me download the file again at no extra charge.

So, I started the download again and forgot about it for a few days. I was messing around in the configuration of my router when I noticed my TiVo had not been assigned an IP address (meaning it was not connected to the network). Once I plugged it in (which is definitely recommended, BTW), the movie showed up in about an hour. I was impressed that the service was able to pick up on a half-completed download and carry it across the goal line a week later.

One more thing: it's very cool to have movies magically show up on your Now Playing list and be able to work with them like any other TiVo recording. And, best of all, it starts playing right away without any stupid menus or FBI warnings. I can definitely see the future here.

If you’re a developer of any kind, you may be able to leverage the neat things Amazon has been doing lately to bring people to their platform. They started with an Internet-based file storage system, moved onto a message queue service, and now they’re going whole hog with virtual servers.

All I’m saying is you may want to think twice before building out your own infrastructure.

Yesterday’s post illustrated how to export your Amazon Wish List into XML. That is very geeky and all well and good, but is there an easier way to save this data to a simple file? The answer is yes: I was pleasantly surprised to see how well modern browsers handled a plain ol’ copy/paste right from a web page. Even more fun, I uncovered an interesting tip in the process.

To get started, go to your Amazon Wish List and click “Compact view.” It may strike you (as it did me) that the convenient table format looks perfect for a copy/paste to Excel. Just select a bunch of stuff from the table, copy, open Excel, and paste it in. Firefox and Safari do similarly well here…when you paste into Excel the data is separated nicely into rows and columns as you’d expect. As for IE, well, this works but it’s annoying: the text is stylized as it is on the web page (hyperlinked, etc.) and the checkboxes, text fields, and graphics from the other columns are pasted in as well. I suppose I could fix this by using Paste Special in Excel…but why would I be using IE anyway?

Actually, speaking of stuff in the other columns, I found that if you actually use the “Move items to another list” view it shows less “extra” columns so it’s even better for the copy/paste approach. (Hey, every little bit helps.)

By now you may be thinking of other uses for the copy/paste approach, since there’s lots of data on the web laid out in tabular format. But you’re probably saying to yourself, “Ross, I know you’re dead sexy, and this is a great tip, but I want to be able to select only certain cells to copy, like I can in Excel.”

The Rossman isn’t gonna let you down. Or rather, Firefox isn’t: Hold down the Ctrl (or Apple) key when selecting cells and the borders of the cells get highlighted, indicating that you’re selecting only certain cells. (Sadly, Safari doesn’t seem to have this feature.) When you paste into Excel using this method, you may have to use Paste Special and select Unicode Text to get it to separate your selection into multiple cells. Also, Excel seems to always put the cells in the same row, but if you save to CSV and get creative with Find and Replace in a good text editor you can fix this.

Tomorrow: a new topic! The Wish List has officially been beaten to death.

No doubt you were captivated by the teaser in yesterday’s post in which I alluded to an automated way to export the items on your Amazon Wish List. The wheels started turning and I remembered Amazon has an API so that you can pull their catalog, etc. into your own apps. Long story short, I was able to pull out my Wish List items in a halfway decent XML format that I could do more with later if I was so motivated. And, I didn’t actually have to write any code to make this work, so you don’t have to be too much of a geek to try this on your own. (Of course, you probably have to be a pretty big geek to want your Wish List items in XML format. Anyway…)

In broad strokes, you need to get an Amazon Web Services account, get the ID of your Wish List, and then access the URL that will spit out the Wish List as XML. It will only spit out ten Wish List items at a time, so you may need to do that step a handful of times. Here are the steps in more detail:

1. Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account. They will send you an e-mail that contains your Subscription ID…you’ll need this in a later step.
2. Open your Wish List and click “Compact view”.
3. Copy/paste the URL of the Compact view page to a text editor…it will look like this:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/ref=<br />cm_wl_sortbar_o_Com/104-8454914-7978319?%5Fencoding=<br />UTF8&id=2GFXLK8KWD6N9&amp;layout=compact&items-per-page=100&amp;page=1
   
   (My apologies for the line breaks.) The ID of your Wish List is after the “id=” and before the next “&”. So, in the example above, it would be 2GFXLK8KWD6N9.
4. Now it’s time to formulate the URL to actually extract the items…you’ll probably want to do this in some kind of text editor to copy/paste and move things around. Start with this:
   
   http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=<br />AWSECommerceService&amp;SubscriptionId=aaa&Operation=ListLookup&amp;<br />ListType=WishList&ListId=bbb&amp;ResponseGroup=ListFull&<br />MerchantId=All&amp;ProductPage=1
   
   Substitute “aaa” with the Subscription ID you got from the first step and “bbb” with the list ID you got in the previous step.
5. Copy/paste your badass URL into a web browser and see what you get. When I did this, I got the first ten items in my list in an XML format. A little bit of Save As action in the browser and I had my file.
6. Assuming you have more than ten items in your list, hit the URL again but change the ProductPage=1 to ProductPage=2 and you’ll get items 11-20 from your list. Hit the URL again with ProductPage=3 to get items 21-30 and so on.

You may notice that the XML contains the name of the item but not the author/artist, which is a little disappointing. But, each Item element contains an ASIN, which is the Amazon Standard Identification Number. Using that you could construct other calls to pull up all kinds of data about the actual item.

Will I ever actually use these files? Who knows. If someday I feel like messing with some programming stuff this is good fodder for that. (I’m thinking Ruby on Rails.) Off the top of my head I’m thinking I’d want a piece of code to read the XML data and spit it out in some nicer format, or perhaps post each item somewhere else. (Backpack, maybe?)

All this API fun softened my attitude towards Amazon…for about eight hours. Then I got an e-mail saying ”buy this new CD from us!” and that might not have been so bad except it was recommended because it was similar to something I bought for my mom as a gift. Suffice it to say it did not exactly match my tastes. As Jon Stewart might say: Oh Amazon…why must you treat your customers so?

Tune in tomorrow for a quick tip on saving off your Wish List data with much less hassle.

After last week’s post about using MP3.com (instead of Amazon’s Wish List) to track music you want to buy, I started thinking about an alternative for tracking books you want to buy. I think I found a pretty good one (though I’d be curious to hear other suggestions): Powell’s.

Powell’s is an actual chain of cool little bookstores in the Pacific northwest. Being very book-centric, they have nice reviews, RSS feeds, and other stuff that appeals to the bibliophile in all of us. But, for our purposes, what’s relevant is that they have a lovely web site with a clean design and a solid Wish List feature. You can actually make multiple lists, make only certain ones public, copy items between lists, etc.

Of course after double-checking Amazon’s site I noticed they have these features as well, but honestly I never noticed because I started adding stuff to my Amazon Wish List before those features existed. Plus, this particular exercise is not really about switching over to get more features…in this case I actually like the fact that the Powell’s site is cleaner and simpler. (Check out this site for some “less is more” software.) Amazon’s crass commercialization is really starting to turn me off…I just don’t care that the Chase credit card is The Official Card of Wish Lists. That particular phrase is actually on the Amazon web site. What is this, the friggin’ Olympics?

Anyway, I started thinking about some kind of automated way to pull the data out of my Wish List. More on this tomorrow in Part II. Stay tuned…

OK, so, as of September 6th, I was no longer under contract with T-Mobile. Finally, time to switch to Cingular: they have coverage at my parents’ vacation cottage (where T-Mobile doesn’t), and switching companies is the best way to get yourself a shiny new phone for free. I had my eye on the Motorola RAZR…I’m a sucker for the smallness, it has Bluetooth and iSync goodness, and I heard it gets really good reception. Amazon.com advertised the RAZR free after rebate right on their home page…so I’m good to go, right?

I ordered the phone late last week, and that’s when I had my first sign of trouble. The Amazon checkout process made no mention of what to do if you want to keep your existing phone number and take it to the new provider. (Contrast this with, say, Cingular’s own web site, where they ask you that question right up front.) No big deal, I figure…I can call Cingular directly and have them port the number.

I got the phone today and included in the packaging is a little crib sheet about activating your phone, and one thing it mentions is how to keep your existing number. There’s a section of the Amazon web site that has the info…scroll down to “Cingular” and this is what you see:

Cingular and Amazon.com have not yet established a method for customers to transfer their current number to a new Cingular account. Unfortunately, in order to port your previous number, Cingular will cancel the account that Amazon.com activated and will activate a new account with the ported number. This process makes you ineligible for the Amazon.com rebates. We hope to offer a porting option in the coming months, so please check back.

W. T. F. As far as I can tell, the super-special rebate offer for the hottest phone on the market featured right on their home page applies to pretty much no one. I mean, who doesn’t already have a cell phone? Or who’s not going to want to keep their number? Suffice it to say there was no link to this information when I was ordering. To add insult to injury, the “process” for porting your number with the other carriers is nothing special…basically, it says to call the company and have their Customer Service people help you through the porting process. That’s pretty much the exact same thing I ended up doing.

That process, by the way, was fantastic. Once I got in touch with the correct department at Cingular the rep stepped me through it and it took effect immediately. Beautiful. Kudos Cingular. Contrast that with the weeks it took when I ported my AT&T Wireless number to T-Mobile some years back…of course, I started that process literally on the first day number porting went into effect, so I was pushing my luck.

So, I think I’m pretty much done with Amazon. I know some people who’ve boycotted them for years once they started patented “1-Click” ordering and crap like that and now I’m on the bandwagon too.

Which leads us to today’s tip: what’s a good way to track music you might want to buy? (I originally used Amazon’s Wish List but now that’s out.) The answer: MP3.com. Their site has a great catalog of tons of albums, with professional reviews for all of them as well as “you might also like this” kinda stuff. It’s everything you get from the Amazon Wish List and more, including this killer feature: it tells you which albums are available on iTunes (or other download services, if you’re into that sort of thing). Nice. That’s where I want to buy my music anyway.

So, to recap, use MP3.com to explore and keep track of music you’re thinking about buying.