How it works

If you have a project on GitHub or Google Code, you can retrieve your project details.

Single project host retrieval URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/open-source/projects/{project-host}.{xml|json}?user={username}

Multiple project host retrieval URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/open-source/projects.{xml|json}?project-host:username={project-host1:username1,project-host2:username2}

Example, requesting projects from Google Code in XML format:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/open-source/projects/googlecode.xml?user=adam.kahtava.com

Response:

Example, requesting projects from GitHub in JSON format:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/open-source/projects/github.json?user=adamdotcom

Response:

Example, requesting projects from both GitHub and Google Code in a single request in XML form:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/open-source/projects.xml?project-host:username=github:adamdotcom,googlecode:adam.kahtava.com

Response:

And Now What?

View my sidebar widget that uses this service to display the latest updates from my source code repositories here.

Contribute, view, or download this openly available source code here.

The Enhanced Whois web service lets me know where my visitor are geographically located, provides filtering capabilities, and can act on referrals. This will allow me (or you) to personalize site greetings, hide my email address (or content) based on the visitor, and provide a unique personal experience. Alternately I can use this service as a classic Whois service.

How it works.

We're not anonymous on the internet and IP addresses are what uniquely defines your internet existence. Whois services let us determine the registrant of internet resources.

Using my Whois service you can:

View your enhanced whois record.

By the visitor's IP address (your IP) URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.xml

Response (using my IP):

<WhoisEnhancedRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <City>Calgary</City>
  <Country>Canada</Country>
  <FilterMatches i:nil="true"/>
  <FriendlyMatches i:nil="true"/>
  <IsFilterMatch>false</IsFilterMatch>
  <IsFriendly>false</IsFriendly>
  <Organization>Shaw Communications Inc.</Organization>
  <StateProvince>AB</StateProvince>
</WhoisEnhancedRecord>

By the visitor's IP address specifying a referrer, and a filter URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced.{xml|json}?filters={filters,filters,...}&referrer={referrer}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois/enhanced/xml?filters=CA&referrer=Twitter

Response (from an IP owned by Google, with a filter for California, and a referrer of Twitter specified):

<WhoisEnhancedRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <City>Mountain View</City>
  <Country>United states</Country>
  <FilterMatches>
    <string>StateProvince</string>
  </FilterMatches>
  <FriendlyMatches>
    <string>google</string>
    <string>twitter</string>
  </FriendlyMatches>
  <IsFilterMatch>true</IsFilterMatch>
  <IsFriendly>true</IsFriendly>
  <Organization>Google Inc.</Organization>
  <StateProvince>CA</StateProvince>
</WhoisEnhancedRecord>

View your classic Whois record.

By the visitor's IP address (your IP) URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois.xml

<WhoisRecord xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <DomainName>68.146.10.100</DomainName>
  <RegistryData>
  <AbuseContact> ... </AbuseContact>
  <AdministrativeContact i:nil="true"/>
  <BillingContact i:nil="true"/>
  <CreatedDate>2002-06-03</CreatedDate>
  <RawText> ... </RawText>
  <Registrant>
    <Address>Suite 800630 - 3rd Ave. SW</Address>
    <City>Calgary</City>
    <Country>CA</Country>
    <Name>Shaw Communications Inc.</Name>
    <PostalCode>T2P-4L4</PostalCode>
    <StateProv>AB</StateProv>
  </Registrant>
  ...
</WhoisRecord>

So... why is this useful?

This is the first step for this site's personalization - if I know where the user came from, where the user is geographically located, and have the capabilities to filter their Whois responses, then I can tailor my content to the user. For example: if someone from Google landed on my site I could mention that I'd love to work there and provide my email address and phone number, similarly if someone from Calgary landed on my site I could provide my public calendar of local events. The possibilities are endless.

This service will be wrapped by a JavaScript widget that will take care of the asynchronous service polling, but that sounds like another post.

Contribute, view, or download the openly available source code here.

How it works.

If you have a resume on LinkedIn and you've added services@adamdotcom.com as a contact then you can:

View your resume - retrieve your Resume by first and last name.

By first and last name URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/resume/linkedin/{firstName-lastName}.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/resume/linkedin/adam-kahtava.xml

Response:

<Resume xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/resume" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <Educations>
    <Education>
      <Certificate>Computer Programming and Analysis</Certificate>
      <Institute>Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology</Institute>
    </Education>
    <Education>
      <Certificate>Bachelor of Science (Honours), Computer Science</Certificate>
      <Institute>Trent University</Institute>
    </Education>
  </Educations>
  <Positions>
    <Position>
      <Company>Corbis ...

Wow that was exciting, so now what?

Well.. Head on over to my resume page. My resume is being pulled from LinkedIn through this very service.

Contribute, view, or download the openly available source code here.

My online portfolio is increasingly scattered through the internet (reviews and wishlist are on Amazon, source code on github / Google Projects, resume on LinkedIn, and so on). I've been working on a couple services that will eventually pull my portfolio together while keeping a single point of reference, and... I'm sharing these services.

Introducing my Amazon Web Service.

How it works.

Basically if you have a Wishlist or a Review list on Amazon you can:

Discover your profile - retrieve your ListId (for WishLists) or CustomerId (for Reviews):

Discovery URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/discover/user/{user-name}.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/discover/user/adam-kahtava.xml

Response:

<Profile xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <CustomerId>A2JM0EQJELFL69</CustomerId>
  <ListId>3JU6ASKNUS7B8</ListId>
</Profile>

View your Reviews - retrieve your Reviews by username or Amazon CustomerId.

By customerId URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/reviews/id/{customerId}.{xml|json}

By username URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/reviews/user/{user-name}.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/reviews/id/A2JM0EQJELFL69.xml

Response:

<Reviews xmlns="http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <Review>
    <ASIN>0321125215</ASIN>
    <Authors>Eric Evans</Authors>
    <AuthorsMLA>Evans Eric.</AuthorsMLA>
    <Content>Through this book Evan's ...

View your Wishlist - view your Wishlist by username or Amazon ListId.

By listId URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/wishlist/id/{listId}.{xml|json}

By username URI:

http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/wishlist/user/{user-name}.{xml|json}

Example:

Request: http://adam.kahtava.com/services/amazon/wishlist/user/adam-kahtava.json

Response:

[{"ASIN":"0471467413","Authors":"Mostafa Abd-El-Barr, Hesham El-Rewini", ...

So now what?

Head on over to my Reviews and Reading List pages. These pages make use of the data from this service. I should also mention that, this service was built on a previous iteration of my Amazon Web Service (How To Display Your Amazon Reviews and Wish List Using Amazon’s Web Services).

Contribute, view, or download the openly available source code here.

If you've ever landed on Amazon then you're probably familiar with their reviews and wish lists. Amazon provides access to these items (and many-many more) through their extensive web services - the Amazon web services can be complex and overwhelming when all you want is a review list and a single user specific wish list. For this site I wanted to pull in my reviews and wish list - displaying them alongside my blog. It's fair to note, that user reviews are available via an RSS feed (but this feed doesn't include all the details I wanted) and the wish list page still doesn't provide an RSS feed. So a custom Amazon web service request was in order.

Let me try to make this story short.

If you want to request your reviews and your wish list you need the following:

• An Amazon Account: http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/homepage.html with at least a wish list or a review.
• An Amazon Associates tag: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/ (this will be your AssociatesTag).
• An Amazon Web Service (AWS) access key: http://aws.amazon.com/ (this will be your AWSAccessKey).

Once you have a wish list or review, you then need to:

• Get your CustomerId for the reviews. I found my CustomerId by navigating to my reviews (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2JM0EQJELFL69/) then pulling out 'A2JM0EQJELFL69' (the last element of the url).
• Get your ListId for your wish list.  I found my ListId by navigating to my wishlist (http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/?id=3JU6ASKNUS7B8) then pulling out '3JU6ASKNUS7B8' (the identifier after id= from the url).

Once you've collected all those bits, you need to:

• Checkout and download the source code for the project and build the assembly or download the pre-compiled assembly.
• Add the assembly reference to your project (remember, I'm assuming you're using .NET).
• Make a call to the application which will generate XML files containing your respective reviews and wish list.

Setting up the call would look something like this:

IAmazonRequest amazonRequest = new AmazonRequest() {
 AssociateTag = "adamkahtavaap-20",
  AWSAccessKeyId = "1MRF________MR2",
  CustomerId = "A2JM0EQJELFL69",
  ListId = "3JU6ASKNUS7B8"
};

IFileParameters fileParameters = new FileParameters() {
  ProductFileNameAndPath = @"Products.xml",
  ReviewFileNameAndPath = @"Reviews.xml",
  ErrorFileNameAndPath = @"Errors.xml"
 };

IAmazonApplication amazonApplication = new AmazonApplication(amazonRequest, fileParameters);

amazonApplication.Save();

And Viola!

If you'd like to provide some design guidance, fix a bug, or request a feature, then visit (or join) the project on Google Code.

Alternatively, you might also be interested in the LINQ To Amazon source featured in the book LINQ in Action.

Issues:

Version 4.0 of the ECS WSDL is not compatible with Microsoft's Visual Studio (VS) 2003. However, the ECS WSDL works fine in VS 2005, a workaround for VS 2003 and other known issues can be found on the Amazon.com Associates: XML Developers Discussion Board.

Useful links:

• Philip Miseldine's tutorial titled: Use Amazon Web Services in ASP.NET
• The Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Known Issues: Amazon.com Associates: XML Developers

This website pulls my reviews, and my recommended reading list off of Amazon.
The originating Amazon data can be viewed here: my Amazon reviews, my Amazon wish list.

Initially the idea of an XML based resume seemed really neat (geeky neat) - with an XML resume you have a single master copy that easily transforms into: HTML, PDF, RTF, or plain text. However, after closer inspection I decided an XML based resume was impractical for my needs.

My reasoning:
I don't have a single resume but a number of different resumes (a generic, a specific, a master etc...).
A word processor is easier to use, has spell check, and is better suited for a resume than an XML editor.
If I ever want to edit or append to my resume in a hurry (in a coffee shop or an internet cafe) I am more likely to find a word processing application than an XML editor.
Very few jobs are secured solely through the internet, the time spent maintaining my XML resume could be better spent meeting, greeting and networking - due to the passive nature of the internet, something like 3% of people actually find work online.
An XML based resume would be more of a novelty than an integral part of my portfolio site.

An XML based resume could prove useful for a HR department, employment agency, or community / social software, but for my personal resume it would be an impracticle novelty.

View my resume here.