Reading Radar: Mashing Up the New York Times and Amazon.com

Andres Ferrate, February 6th, 2009

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Last week we reported on the release of another API by The New York Times: the Times Bestseller’s API. Well it didn’t take long for the API to make its way into a neat book recommendation engine called Reading Radar.

Developed by John Herren, a previous winner of the Best Mashup Contest at MashupCamp and a devoted mashup developer, Reading Radar combines the Times Bestseller’s API with Amazon’s web services to serve up a fast and straightforward list of popular books. John has written an introductory post on his blog:

I’m a fan of APIs, Web Services, and Mashups, and it’s no secret. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create and publish more mashups, instead of simply lengthening my ever-growing ideas.txt file. [...] When I saw the Reddit post about the New York Times Best Seller API, I thought it would be a good opportunity to do a mashup for popular books. My hope was to create a site that could be on “auto-pilot” and maybe even send me a Amazon Associate check every now and then. I designed the site to use extensive caching of the NYT and Amazon APIs to minimize remote calls, but update the data often enough so that the information would be fresh.

John goes on to elaborate on how Reading Radar leverages several frameworks and libraries, including the Maintainable Framework, elements of the Zend Framework, YUI, and jQuery. This mashup serves as a great example of how emerging and mature APIs can be used to rapidly develop a functional and useful mashup. And it’s our Mashup of the Day today. Nicely done, John!