amazon-hacks

AmazonHacks by Jacob Harris [e-mail] Blog: http://www.nimblecode.com/ NYC.rb: http://www.nycruby.org/

== DESCRIPTION:

Mainly the product of messing around, this gem comprises Ruby code for a few useful "Amazon Hacks" -- common techniques for manipulating Amazon product URLs and Images. This is mainly useful if you find yourself creating a site where you might link to Amazon product pages and display images for them. Examples of this might include:

• Social consumption sites like {All Consuming}[http://www.allconsuming.net/]
• Blogs or tumbleblogs with book/music/etc. reviews
• Normalizing Amazon links or create associate IDs

This GEM is NOT related to using the Amazon Web Services and there is already an excellent gem for that if you need more heavy-duty use of the Amazon website (this gem does not even communicate with Amazon at all). Also, note this gem is meant in the spirit of fun hackery. You can use it to create interesting images from Amazon on demand, but if you are going to use it on a serious website, please consider caching and attributing that image to Amazon (I also have no idea what the official legal policy for using Amazon's book images is).

And of course, do not even consider using this for fraud. It is possible to generate "20% off" or "Look Inside!" badges on Amazon images, but this gem does not support that since I can not think of any reason why outside sites would use that.

== FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

There are two main classes within the Amazon::Hacks namespace with the following functionality:

=== Link (product URL)

• Extract country of site
• Extract ASIN (Amazon identifier)
• Normalize (reduce to most basic URL for matching)
• Associate URL (create a normalized URL with your Amazon Associate ID)

=== Image

• Derive a corresponding image URL from a product URL
• Sizes (small, medium, large)
• Shadow
• Border
• Crop
• Scale
• Tilt
• Blur
• Sharpen
• Highlight
• Text overlay

This is still a work in development, and while I have tested against some generic Amazon rules, it is possible that certain countries might deviate from Amazon's practices (for instance, China seems to not use the image generation code and instead just links to static URLs). Let me know if you find any issues for a given product link/image. Thank you.

== SYNOPSIS:

To use, simply +require 'amazon_hacks'+

=== LINKS

This gem is inspired by the {Abusing Amazon Images}[http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html] page.

== REQUIREMENTS:

• Requires the 'color-tools' gem

== INSTALL:

• sudo gem install amazon-hacks

== LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2006 FIX

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.