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A while back I noticed that film critic Roger Ebert started tweeting various deals and interesting products he stumbled across while browsing through Amazon. I certainly wasn’t the only one who noticed Mr. Ebert was doing this with some frequency and one day Internet Nice Guy & Bea Arthur fancier - Mike Monteiro asked:

Quick as a flash I dug into Twitter’s search operators and determined a feed could be created pretty simply by formatting my search thusly: from:@ebertchicago amzn filter:links (amzn because it forms the core of Amazon’s URL shortener). Presto we had a feed which could be monitored: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Aebertchicago+amzn+filter%3Alinks
That was kind of nice but truth be told, I really don’t bother with feeds much these days so started wondering what else I might do with this information. Well I’ll tell you what you can do with that information, you can just go right ahead and create: http://ebertpicks.com
As mentioned in the site’s footer I’ve been rather blatant in drawing inspiration for the layout from Ethan Marcotte‘s excellent article on Responsive Web Design. FYI, I emailed Ethan about the site before going public and he’s cool with it. The man is mensch.
So that’s it. A fun little project that I hope people might enjoy referencing from time to time.
obiter dicta
Jul 12, 2011
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