Yesterday at the Simpleweb Halloween Hack Day I built a little service on top of the upcoming Invisible Hand API yesterday, Invisible Widget: http://invisible.herokuapp.com
It's basically two parts:
- A proxy for the API that renders a webpage full of results but with no layout with most of the same options as the API passable via url parameters, written in node.js
- A jquery plugin that embeds that page into any webpage as an iframe with some nice default options
The use case for this can be seen on LNUG.org, I wanted to embed some links to Node.js books but not have to manage the links myself.
Some things I'd have liked to add if I had time:
- Autodectection of region from user's request, i.e. show german results to users in germany
- Pass through a list of ISBNs and show all of them with the cheapest prices
- Ability to pass through a url for a custom stylesheet so it can match the site it's embedded in
- A little invisible hand promo badge at the bottom
- Varnish caching to reduce number of api requests
- Better documentation
Hopefully once the API is available to all there will be a revenue-share program so anyone can profit from embedding the widget in their site.
