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cleaning up after iTunes

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: pointing iTunes “now playing” links to either Amazon or iTunes:

I suspect an automated process could be implemented with a Perl script.

My goal would be to have ecto (where I craft these scintillating posts) drop in the correct Amazon link when I tell it to post what I’m listening to.

So this snippet that links to a Google search on the artist’s name:
now playing: Svefn G Englar from the album Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros

becomes this which also takes you to the product page on Amazon.com:
now playing: Svefn G Englar from the album Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros

As it happens, there’s a perl module ready-made for the task: Net::Amazon – Query amazon.com via SOAP:

Net::Amazon is a Perl module providing an object-oriented interface to amazon.com’s SOAP and XML/HTTP interfaces. This way it’s possible to create applications using Amazon’s vast amount of data via a functional interface, without having to worry about the underlying communication mechanism.

But I don’t see any sample code that suggests I can pass a CD name and/or artist’s name and get back the exact ASIN so I can fix my iTunes database.

More investigation is required. I’m sure someone has done this already or something close to it.

This was written by paul. Posted on Wednesday, May 12, 2004, at 9:16 PM. Filed under observations. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. mrG wrote:

    yes we got no execution videos — I wondered about that; my http://www.teledyn.com also received dozens of these requests and it has never even referenced the story.

    Something is up. Does Google just note that a site has a search form and then hit that form for every freakin’ request it ever sees? I don’t think that’s likely or my site would have exploded a long time ago. So then what is it? Maybe one of the RSS headlines in my aggregator mentioned Berg? So that means Google is leveraging my search for every word my 6-year-old site has ever used? Is this possible?

    Or is it something else.

    I smell a news story here …

    Friday, May 14, 2004 at 5:38 AM | Permalink
  2. mrG wrote:

    Amazing: 613 hits yesterday across all the search engines, and they were all there, msn, aol, google, myway … only these weren’t direct invocations of my search script, they were search engine results leading to my aggregator page (or the sub-category pages) where I suppose the headline and excerpt had been indexed, only with the story long since pushed off the RSS by newer things, people naturally said WTF? and hit my ubiquitous search form.

    Sure enough, filtering my logs on referrers from the main, category or per-feed pages yeilds the same number as the search hits.

    Yet another reason why it smells bogus when webmasters boast about their hit-counts without qualifying what, from where and why ;)

    Friday, May 14, 2004 at 6:16 AM | Permalink