Dark Light

On the front page of Aquarionics is a brand new thing, which is – co-incidentally – also a thing we’ve had since launch in January 2000. It’s gone though various code revisions, various new versions, and various rethinks. This doesn’t mark it as differant from the rest of the site, merely part of it.

It’s called “Mostly” where once it was “This week I have mostly been…” and it’s current version is merely a reading list. It started off as just a list of things I was doing (Listening to Divine Comedy, Reading Cryptonomicon, Playing The Sims), evolved into using Amazon’s Associate scheme so that you could see more details about the item – and even buy it, and then into a JavaScript thing that sent you to differant amazon.* sites depending on which you chose. Now, it’s linked into the Amazon Web Services API (code, and mostly() in the library) to give you prices in dollars, yen, pounds and euros as well as the latest editions. The main difference as far as admin is concerned is that instead of having to find the Amazon ASIN number for each country for each item, I now just give it “author:’foo’ title:’bar’” and an Amazon department to look at.

But this isn’t special. Amazon Light has been going for over a year now based on the web services stuff, I can’t help but feel I’m spending all this time playing catchup to people like Mark and Sam and wishing I had time to play with all this cool stuff, or to specialise in something. For any thing I can do, I know at least three people who can do it better, faster, or more elegantly. I need to do something new. Then I might be invited to things like Foo Camp 🙂

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