Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Amazon.com Wishlist to RSS

Being perfection herself, my wife loves books, and as a loving and dutiful husband, her Amazon wishlist is required reading for Christmas, birthdays, and all other occasions. But keeping track of the wishlist is a pain if I have to trudge over to Amazon every time. Far better to have my feed reader do it for me, with the help of a little script. Figure 10-1 shows my wishlist to give you an idea of what one looks like.

Figure 10-1. My Amazon.com wishlist page

This feed uses the Amazon Web Services API to do its evil work. This can be either REST- or SOAP-based, so you can choose your own preferred poison. For fun, I’ll do this using the REST interface, and then using XML::Simple to parse the XML. My idea of fun might not be the same as yours, of course.

Walking Through the Code

As always, we fire up the script with the loading of the modules and the setting of some global variables: the obligatory use strict; and use warnings;, and the required Amazon API subscription key. You’ll need to get your own from http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html.

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::RSS;
use XML::Simple;
use LWP::Simple qw(!head);
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Getopt::Long;
use Date::Manip;

my $amazon_subscription_id = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
my $rss = new XML::RSS( version => '2.0' );

As this script is running as a CGI application, it requires the Amazon Wishlist ...