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As my latest period of unemployment continues to lengthen I’ve worked on an ever larger collection of PHP code that I’ve written and used to make several web mashups. As I’ve learned of new APIs I’ve thought if it made sense to add them, most don’t. I did start adding support for the BestBuy Remix API but I was disappointed in what new capabilities it could actually add to my own code. It doesn’t do more than the Amazon Product API and for me it doesn’t have as much useful data. The one thing the Amazon Product API lacks is a way to access the preview tracks on Amazon.com.
Another recent development is Amazon has decided to require all queries to the Amazon Product API need to include an associate tag. I’ve had an associate tag for many, many, years but I don’t think I’ve ever made a dime. So the 100s of hours I’ve spent working on all this PHP code hasn’t been financially beneficial. So after getting an email informing me of these changes I did a little investigating and I contacted the person who’s code I used as initially. I never heard back.
Image may be NSFW.
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One thing I’ve found is a lot of online PHP code isn’t of the quality I would expect given the author is posting it online and encouraging people to use it. The short comings of some of the code led me to write a much more elaborate solution than I originally intended which I’ve kept expanding, even though I’m not sure anyone is using it for anything. I haven’t put it in one of those online code repositories, perhaps I should but I never intended it to become a project…
I’ve talked to recruiters recently who haven’t had the best news, perhaps I may try being a software developer again, but surely not in PHP. I don’t understand why it is so popular.
I revisited some of the older methods I wrote using the Amazon Product API, I never could get preview tracks for albums. I read that this was possible, but even that guy admits it no longer works. Amazon.com has preview tracks for the songs and albums you can buy off them, but accessing those previews directly isn’t supported by the Amazon Product API and their documentation also disappoints at times. Luckily a lot of people use the Amazon Product API and every now and then I find a new example which gives me some ideas or insight or confirmation that what I was trying to do wasn’t easy or even possible.
I’m not sure I’m going to do a lot more work on this code base, maybe I should look at adding it to a real code versioning system, but I did end up joining stackoverflow, it seems to be the go to place for coding help now.
I’ve got plans to do some learning and to work on our family’s geneaology some more. I even bought software to make it easier, but that is another blog posting and a lot more research to be undertaken.
Update
I did yet more work on all these classes. I never made a new mashup and I’m still disappointed with the BestBuy Remix API, I occasionally find CDs with it, but it works worse when attempting to find films. Rotten Tomatoes changed their API at some point so I had to fix some old methods, still thinking of putting the code into gitHub and I eventually did…
