From Online Stores
E-commerce sites can make very good use of feeds. Customers wanting to subscribe to, say, an individual artist’s discography can be alerted the instant that a new title is available. More of this sort of thing is dealt with in Chapter 10, but in the meantime, the following sites are available now:
- Amazon.com
The Internet’s biggest retailer has started to publish feeds itself, but they’re not as configurable as those produced by the Lockergnome Amazon RSS Feed Generator, http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/resources/amazon.phtml. It’s a simple checkbox and submit page, and worth playing with, although it only supports searching Amazon.com at the moment.
There is also an Amazon.co.jp-to-RSS service at http://723.to/azrssmake.php.
- iTunes Music Store
Apple’s iTunes Music Store is extremely well-enabled for feeds. You can subscribe to feeds of new releases, top songs and albums, featured tracks, and so on for any combination of musical genres. Do this by visiting its RSS Generator at the marvellously memorable http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/MRSS/rssGenerator (see Figure 3-3).
