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.