September 07, 2004
Building a Better Reading List - Part 2
Well, I ended up building an application in Access that let me include all the features I want for a book list. It turned out to be trivial to include an option that let me search Amazon.com for book details like ISBN number right from within the Access form. I also added an options to produce three version of the list (by title, by author and by category) and to automatically post them in batch via FTP (and/or drag and drop them from a local directory to the web site). While not dynamic and not web-based, this quick-and-dirty solution works well for me. I also decided to host all cover pictures from my site, which I think will make for faster viewing than relaying requests for pictures to Amazon.com.
