booktwo.org

I was recently asked by the good people at Proboscis to undertake a virtual residency, exploring their Bookleteer suite of tools. Bookleteer is described as “a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening—creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information”, and also as a form of samizdat for the twentieth century.

I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog.

One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the…

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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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