Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools [Paul Bausch]

At its core, Amazon.com is a great big database concerned with lots of stuff--books, of course, but also tools, clothing, films on DVD, kitchen equipment, and lots and lots (and lots) of Harry Potter paraphernalia. Want to wear an Anna Kournikova exercise brassiere while juicing celery (presumably with considerable vigor)? Amazon can help. Need a cricket bat, radar gun, dietary fiber supplement, or vibrasonic molechaser? Amazon has what you need. Which is all great, but the real value of Amazon.com isn't that these things are in the database. The real value of this site lies in the information about all that stuff--reviews, sales rankings, recommendations, and the like--and the large number of ways to access it. Amazon Hacks explains how to get the most out of Amazon.com as an ordinary customer with a Web browser and as a software developer interested in the site's considerable collection of Web Services.

In Amazon Hacks, Paul Bausch documents most of the avenues Amazon.com has opened up for exploration of the database. A lot of his coverage borders on the obvious: Sections on how to "Power-Search for Books" and "Put an Item Up for Bid at Amazon Auctions" aren't too different from Amazon's own explanatory articles. Coverage of how to add an Amazon search box to your own site, and add Amazon Associates item links to various kinds of Weblogs (including Blosxom and Moveable Type) are much handier. Bausch really shines when explaining Amazon.com's

Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP

Tag clouds are everywhere on the web these days. First popularized by the web sites Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us, these amorphous clumps of words now appear on a slew of web sites as visual evidence of their membership in the elite corps of "Web 2.0." This PDF analyzes what is and isn't a tag cloud, offers design tips for using them effectively, and then goes on to show how to collect tags and display them in the tag cloud format. Scripts are provided in Perl and PHP.

Yes, some have said tag clouds are a fad. But as you will see, tag clouds, when used properly, have real merits. More importantly, the skills you learn in making your own tag clouds enable you to make other interesting kinds of interfaces that will outlast the mercurial fads of this year or the next.

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have dramatically increased ourability to store, organize, and access information. Today, I can instantly answer allkinds of questions that would have stumped me 20 years ago, and I have access toa wealth of words, sounds, and imagesfar more than I have the intellectualcapacity to consume. You could say we're in the midst of an informationexplosion, but I like to think we're being served an information cornucopia.

The abundance of this information is ever increasing, and the user interfaces webuilt ten years ago to access and organize it are starting to show signs of strain andwear, like a rickety folding table supporting the weight of a thousand pies.

Tag clouds are just one of a new crop of interfaces that aim to ease this strain.There are others, which succeed to greater and lesser degrees, and there will bebetter ones to come. I hope to have a part in making some of them, and I hope youdo too.

TABLE OF CONTENT:

• Tag Clouds: Ephemeral or Enduring?
• Weighted Lists
• Some History
• Design Tips for Building Tag Clouds
• Making Tag Clouds in Perl
• Making Tag Clouds in PHP