booktwo.org

Warning: deeply dull post ahead. But, we’ve had a lot of discussion about bookdata, APIs, and Amazon on this blog, so it would be remiss of me not to post this.

From August 15th, Amazon requires all API requests to be signed, which to the layman means that you need to add a timestamp, and a ‘signature’, which is a hash of the entire request, and your private Amazon key.

There are a bunch of PHP examples for doing this on the web, but because I had to tweak them all slightly to get them to work, I…

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A couple of months ago, I drew this on the back of an envelope:

That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your reading and bookmarking on the go; London Lit Plus, the open-source literature festival which ran in 2007 and 2008; Cooking With Booze; many smaller projects, and of course my work…

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Recently, I did some work with Newspaper Club, the new startup from from the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group, building on their rather wonderful Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet project.

Looking to test the systems they’re working on and start building a portfolio of possibilities, they offered me the chance to create a newspaper from scratch. I jumped at the chance.

The Book Club Boutique is a weekly literary night in Soho bringing together new writers, performance poets and musicians in a suitably decadent atmosphere. Founded by Selena Godden…

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