If you are an amazon.com associate, you may have noticed that you are able to get xml data from them about certain products. Up to now, this was restricted to "browsing" or "searching", i.e you would get data about a few items, and you didn't really have control over what you get.

This has been changed recently (it's still in beta, as far as I can see) to also allow for product specific information. You enter an ASIN number (unique product identifcation), and you get an XML record of this product.

This is great news for Links SQL owners, who like me, feature some resources (books) which link to amazon.com. It basically means that you can display up-to date information, images, prices about the products.

Basically, you will be able to set up a book store (or any product they sell), and you will always have the latest info about the products.

I will think about how I can integrate this precisely into my site. Since I am using static pages, I was thinking of building (yet another) plugin, that fetches information about all your amazon.com related links and stores them in the links table. For dynamic page, you might be able to fetch the info in real time from the amazon server, but I don't know if that's a good idea, since you would be relying on them....

If you have suggestions. let me know.

Ivan
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Iyengar Yoga Resources / GT Plugins