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Re: Phht! on screenscaping

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On 9/30/2011 12:04 PM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On my website I have links to 20 different bookstores.  The problem
> is, there is no guarantee all the bookstores actually carry any given
> book.  I wanted to grey-out links to bookstores that don't for now
> carry that particular book.
>
> This means probing every bookstore with every ISBN to see if they have
> it.  I discovered I needed an average of 8 marker strings to analyse
> the response  There are about 4 different ways they say they have the
> book and 4 to say they do not.  I found this by trial and error,
> adding more and more strings and seeing if there were responses that
> could not be categorised, then translating and examining the responses
> for likely markers, then looking at the original. This was complicated
> somewhat since some of the bookstores are in German, French, Italian
> and Spanish.
>
> As the bookstores change their wordings, I will have to keep adjusting
> my program to track.

Lot of work.

And potentially non legal.

> All his would be so much easier if the bookstores would offer an
> alternate computer-friendly api.  You could give them an ISBN, and
> they could give you back some XML, JSON, CSV etc, with a single Yes/No
> instock field.  It would take them all of an hour to cook something
> up.

If you have worked in professional software development then
you would know that there are no such thing as adding a new
feature for 1 hour of work.

Arne

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Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-09-30 09:04 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:10 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:24 -0700
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:30 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:40 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:19 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:21 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-09-30 22:53 -0300
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 22:11 -0400
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-01 09:09 -0300
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-10-01 15:48 -0400
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Movable Hype <mhype101@snortwad.net> - 2011-10-02 03:40 +0000
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-02 10:20 -0300
            Re: Phht! on screenscaping Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-10-02 08:43 -0700
              Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-10-02 16:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-10-02 12:11 +0000
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:03 -0700

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