I spent the weekend working on integrating our Library catalog with Amazon. Should have been working on more important things, but this is cool.
So, we were talking about making our catalog at the MSU libraries more friendly. More like Amazon. I've been messing with the awesome Greasemonkey Firefox extension, and figured I'd look for Greasemonkey extensions that did anything with Amazon.Turns out somebody has already done something:
http://snarfed.org/space/palo+alto+library+amazon+greasemonkey
This was written for the Palo Alto library, but it was easy enough to modify to get working with MSU's catalog. The result is in a screeshot below:
Notice the new link under the title? It links to MSU's record for the book.
And here's what it looks like when the item is checked out:
So then, I got thinking (inspired by Dave Bryson) about working it the other way. Integrating the excellent Amazon resources (related items, etc.) into Magic, our catalog system. Turns out there are some other projects working on this, notably the Silkworm project. Their site is a bit wordy, but they do have some working code. I hacked it up, got it working with the US amazon servers, and the result is below:
and scrolling down a bit, you see the related items:
If you want to install the scripts, you'll need Firefox and Greasemonkey installed. Below is a link to the first one:
http://www.thedomokun.com/~josh/code/greasemonkey/amazonmsu.user.js
I'm looking for a way to obfuscate my Amazon subscription ID before I post the second one.