My Developer Book Site

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In my position as Web Services Evangelist for Amazon.com, I work to get developers to build cool sites and cool tools using the Amazon Web Services. I also try to write my own code from time to time, so that I can know what it is like to be an AWS developer.

A while ago I wrote a fairly simple script and used it to populate a single-page store at www.developer-books.com. I had often thought about writing a more powerful script, but there was never enough time to do what I wanted.

On my recent trip to Utah, I set up a meeting with Justin Mecham, the creative wizard behind TV Mojo and the Gyrofly Store (among others). Justin explained to me that he built a script to power his own stores, and then decided to distribute free and commercial versions once he realized that he had built something that was easy to use and very powerful. The result is Associate-O-Matic. When I met with Justin (in a public library in a dusty little Utah town), he told me that it was possible to get a store up and running in 30 minutes or less.

This evening I actually had 30 minutes to spare, and I decided to see what I could do in that time. I managed to download the script, get all of the files in the right places, and renovated the Developer Books site to my satisfaction. Mission accomplished, as they say. The resulting site is functional, powerful, and a lot better than anything I could have designed and built on my own. I’m impressed. The script has a lot of options, each one carefully documented and thoroughly explained.

When I have some more time I will add additional categories and do some further customization, but there’s not much more that I need to do.

Nice work, Justin!

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