Amazon Hacks

Add a “Currently Reading” List to Your Web Site

With a single line of code, you can give visitors an instant glimpse into what you’re reading.

Letting people know what we’re reading has always been an efficient way to give them a quick glimpse into our tastes—giving us a chance to appear insightful or silly or witty or dumb at a glance. We mention books we’re reading at parties, during interviews, at the dinner table, so it’s no surprise that we’re also mentioning them in our web sites. Unfortunately, until recently, this required messing around with HTML to get the book’s title, author, cover image, and maybe a few comments about the book on your site, and there was no way to find other people who were reading the same book.

Amazon’s Web Services make it easy for a programmer to write a script to retrieve information and do all kinds of fun stuff with it, but programmers shouldn’t be the only ones to get cool book lists on their sites. All Consuming allows you to maintain a list of books on your site with minimal effort and no programming knowledge at all. You don’t even need to know HTML; you just have to cut and paste a couple lines of code into your site, and then you can maintain your list remotely from All Consuming. Also, because All Consuming knows what a lot of different people are reading, it gives you an easy way to find other people who are reading the same books, and instantly includes your comments in the loosely connected conversations around the Web.

Setting Up Your ...