Two weeks ago, Seth Godin asked for a websheet that could take a list of book titles and return the cover art from Amazon. The post also mentioned EditGrid.

Today, I’ve got some free time to re-visit this blog post. Is this possible? I asked one of my colleagues. “Give me an hour”, my colleague replied.

And here is what I have from my colleague. The resulting bookshelf is here:

And the spreadsheet:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf

And the XSL to transform the data in spreadsheet into the bookshelf:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.covers.html.xsl

Right! This is a good showcase of EditGrid’s “My Data Format” (MDF) feature, which has been available since Public Beta 11 released in late August. If you would like to create your own bookshelf, follow these steps:

1. Login with your EditGrid a/c. (Register if you don’t have one.)
2. Click the following link to clone the spreadsheet. The XSL will be copied as well.

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.copy

3. Save it and input your set of information (you’ll need to give the cloned spreadsheet a name).
4. Your bookshelf is now ready via your spreadsheet’s permalink + “.covers.html”.

Yes, that’s how simple it is! You can easily mashup other web services using EditGrid as the data storage and transformation medium. EditGrid’s MDF has allowed a group of expert users to generate KML files for Google Earth.

MDF enables innovation on EditGrid. And there’ll be more!

P.S.

• We use Amazon’s web service to get the book cover image, so we add a link to link to the book in Amazon. Fair deal, right?
• If you would like to use a serious personal bookshelf service, we recommend Anobii, another Hongkong-based Web 2.0 service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 12:26 am and is filed under Articles, Cookbook, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.