Project: Amazon Kindle Free Top eBooks

See results for Project: Amazon Kindle Free Top eBooks.

Ok, so this mini-project was much more challenging than the last two - Google Freebie & Apple Freebie.

In this project, we were again trying to use IFTTT to automate the posting to this blogger site.  And we were looking for new Amazon Kindle Free Top eBooks.  (I have to warn you, they were mostly romance novels... ugh...)

The challenge in this exercise was finding the list of Free Kindle Books.  And then finding a way to read from the site via IFTTT.

So there were existing recipes which are a bit dated that use the RSS feed of the Top 100 Free Kindle eBooks.  That feed has since been removed from the site and no longer support by Amazon.

Problem... maybe, maybe not...

We have our technique or framework of getting the info to Blogger -- IFTTT using an RSS Feed to post to Blogger.

The only missing piece was the RSS feed for Amazon.  After a few searches, there wasn't a good solution offered by Amazon, so I decided to search for ways to create our own RSS feed of the Amazon page.

Now, there are ways to script/scrape the data we want from the Amazon page which we may explore in a later project.  But for us getting to the goal of this project quickly, I decided to go with a 3rd Party solution - why reinvent the wheel, right?

Here's a list of the different services I found that allow you to create RSS feeds with their site:

• FetchRSS - Free Account w/ Limited Features which unlock when you pay for it.  This service was super quick.  Just click on the containers you want and the feed is populated with that info.
• Feed43 - This site is completely free + no registration; a bit more technical as you have to parse the tags with rules; close to coding it yourself.
• Feed Creator by FiveFilters - Similar to Feed43, but a little more user friendly, but less customization available.  

I decided just for completing this project, we'd go with FetchRSS.  This means we'll be limited to 5 news items with each feed request and refreshes only every 24 hours and ads...

Even as I type this out, I'm thinking this solution kinda sucks.  But better to ship early then never.

We'll revisit this project at a later date and see about upgrading the RSS feed... either with these other services, or by creating our own web service to build the RSS Feed.

Thanks,

Alex