Good news -- Kaleena finally got her digital camera today. Guess she's all set for her trip to Korea now. The top picture is the main result so far. Joepie says 'Haai!'

Colgate Book Exchange

Thankgiving break seems like a long time ago now. I've thrown myself at a little project the last couple of days: improving the Colgate Book Exchange. Have a look at the screenshots; this is what the site looks like now. The basic concept is still the same: the site lets you keep track of a 'Books to Sell' and a 'Books to Buy' list.

I didn't just change the layout and the graphics, though. The most important new 'feature' is integration with Amazon.com. For every search result, a little Amazon icon indicates whether that book is available. The search result detail also includes the lowest offered price at Amazon. Clicking on the icon takes you straight to that book's page on Amazon.

The most obvious advantage is that if you can't get a certain book from another Colgate student, you can easily pick it up on Amazon. This makes it more useful to keep track of your 'Books to Buy' list on the site. It also forces the students who are selling books to price their books competitively. On top of that, the integration script I wrote to fetch this information from Amazon was a very cool little excercise in web services programming, and the little icons have a very important geekness factor.

By the way, note that books listed on the Colgate Book Exchange are *not* automatically cross-listed on Amazon. I figured that'd be ever so slightly 'beyond the scope' of the Book Exchange (read: although it'd be awesome, it would be way too time consuming to implement).

On that note, I have a couple more things to do. The front page needs some instructions (and some 'terms of service'). After that, I'll be bulk e-mailing and putting up posters like last semester... Oh joy.