onfocus

We arrived home safely in Oregon and found a winter wonderland. It snowed most of the day today—giant, sticky flakes—perfect for snowballs. Here are a couple snapshots from a walk near our place:





Happy new year!

Update: Matt wrote the year in my driveway. And I posted a couple more pictures from today here and here.

I can't believe it snowed in Corvallis while I'm away. I've been in Nebraska for a week and haven't seen a bit of snow. (But that made traveling to Kansas much safer.)

I spent some time in Hoxie, Kansas over the holidays with family. Here are a few photos from the trip:


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The stars are insanely bright there. (Didn't get any pictures of those, though.)

I'm still alive—and I'm still in Nebraska. Have you ever had your flight cancelled in the middle of the Christmas traveling season? Every flight at every airport is booked solid. Thanks for extending my trip several days, United! (that's sarcasm.)

shew, it's finally winter solstice—halfway to spring.

At least three big-box hardware stores—including Home Depot—have been courting Corvallis. Home Depot had a site in mind, but they needed some zoning changes to make it happen. Last night the city council decided not to change the potential research/technology site for Home Depot: Home Depot plan shot down. On one hand it would be convenient to have a giant megastore here (especially now that I own a home), but I have to weigh choice and availability with lifestyle. I chose to live in a small town, and at some point you hope the character of the town you want to live in takes priority over financial gain.

Update: Upon futher review it was the planning commission that said no, not the city council. So anything could happen.

I made some changes over at ORblogs tonight. (If you're an Oregonian, you might want to get the full scoop on the changes in the discussion forum.) The change that I think will make the site much more useful is a small one—subtly highlighting post excerpts that are related to Oregon. Any post excerpt that talks about Oregon or has an Oregon place name will slightly stand out from the rest. I also added pages for cities in Oregon. The city pages are like the front page but limit weblogs, post excerpts, and photos to those associated with that city. Portland has the most associated weblogs with 46. My fair city only has three weblogs. There are 181 Oregon weblogs listed in all.

1976design.com has a very cool title banner that displays the current time of day and weather conditions where the author is. Scroll down to "The panorama" on his colophon page to see how it's done. It was inspired by the (also) cool Lawrence, KS weather page that went around a while back. (And I'm guessing the Moon Phase pictures from the Naval Observatory—or something like them.) [via BlogPopuli]

Here's an article about a study linking Amazon customer reviews with sales: More Power to the People. I thought this was interesting: "...a longer five-star review has less of a positive sales impact than a shorter one. Chevalier and Mayzlin speculate that it takes more words to give a good, but mixed, review than a rave review." Also, negative reviews have a greater impact on sales than positive reviews in the other direction.

I was asked another question recently about what Amazon Sales Rank means in sales, exactly. Unfortunately, I don't know the specifics. Amanda posted more from our exchange on the Foreword weblog. She's asking for any insight into the real meanings of Sales Rank.

Yesterday I talked with Leslie Walker from the Washington Post about Amazon Web Services and Web Services in general, and she included some of our conversation in an article today: Early Days Of a Data-Sharing Revolution.

The contact form is already paying off. ;) Got a great question from Kolin about adapting the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder to make feeds for Amazon.co.uk products. I thought I'd share the answer so other folks across the pond can build feeds for their Amazon.

Here's how the modification for UK works: create a keyword feed with the feed builder like normal. For example, you could type "Beatles" under CD Feeds. Then click on the resulting RSS feed. You should get an XML page in your browser that has a long Amazon URL like this:

US Beatles RSS Feed

(Take a look at the URL of the link above in your browser status bar, or copy to a text editor.) You need to make two changes.

1. Add &locale=uk to the end of the URL.
2. Change the domain to xml-eu.amazon.com.

Like this:

UK Beatles RSS Feed

Presto, Amazon.co.uk RSS feed! Unfortunately, category IDs can differ across Amazon sites, so only Keyword/Author and Power Search feeds will adapt reliably. If you want to go through the hassle of finding the UK-specific category IDs, you can still use the feed-builder to get you most of the way there.

Here's a quick way to find UK category IDs. Go to the UK website, and click something under "Browse" on the lefthand side of the page. Then drill down to something like, "Art, Architecture & Photography". You get a URL like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/91/

(There's some junk after that last slash on the site, but this is the good stuff we care about.) After browse/-/ in the URL is the category ID for "Art, Architecture, & Photography" books: 91.

Now that you know the ID, create a category book feed with the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder, make the UK changes above, and change the category ID in the URL. The category ID is called "Browse Node" in Amazon lingo. And the piece of the URL you need to change is BrowseNodeSearch=x. (and in this case, x = 91.) There you have it, an Amazon RSS feed for Art, Architecture & Photography books at Amazon UK.

Of course, the easiest way to build UK feeds would be for someone to build a UK-specific Amazon RSS Feed-Builder—but then you wouldn't get the thrill that comes with Amazon Hacking on your own.