So I learned a hard, but useful lesson last week. Don't overcommit yourself, and don't offer an open-ended service to the world if you're not confident you can and will support it indefinitely. Over a year ago I built a small suite of widgets to allow people to copy and paste javascript into their sites that would show Amazon.com items. Basically they were ads, and I unintentionally turned myself (and my webhost) into an adserver (the ads were driven by ASP). I did make a little bit of money, but the overhead and maintenance (well over 1,000 sites using this by last month) was killing me. Every time Amazon or my webserver went down, javascript errors or hung pages were flying around the internet, with angry folks hunting me down.

Last week, it all came to a head, my web host's machines were collapsing, and they were ready to pull the plug on me, so I decided to switch everything off. As of now, Amazon Light's Web tools are no more. BUT - I've got a new, more flexible way to do the same thing now, XML-to-Javascript Widgets. This is an easy, free way for anyone to place live Amazon.com data on any website.

These widgets use XSLT to transform Amazon's XML Feeds into Javascript, and CSS to style the lists. The code is free for anyone to use and/or modify (in fact, I ask that people download and host their own XSL and CSS files).

The setup is not as simple as the older tools, I can't mask the complexity of amazon's offerings, but hopefully there's enough info here for people to make useful things with this. I felt bad that the old tools had to be killed so unceremoniously, and felt an urge to give away this code freely. It's also a good way to get myself off the hook ;) You get what you pay for, no? If you have any problems, suggestions, etc. Let me know.