Surfarama

UPDATE 07/01/08: This script isn’t running anymore. I don’t know quite what happened actually…I think I deleted something accidentally when moving hosts. I might get around to getting it working soon if I can make some time. If you came here wondering about accessing TradeMe on your mobile check this http://m.trademe.co.nz/

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Rowan posted news the other day about a Trade Me Vista Gadget which had been developed for sellers to track their listings on the desktop. Awesome…and equally interesting is the lite weight API which the gadget accesses to do this, available for anyone to use!

Within hours a Google gadget was developed, and then a Javascript widget to post a list of your own listings on your blog or website. My contribution is not nearly as sexy or sophisticated as those efforts, but I hope useful…

I want to access a run down of my Trade Me listings on my mobile, so here’s a real simple way to convert that XML stream to a mobile friendly format. Just point your mobile browser to the following URL:

http://www.surfarama.com/tm/username

Obviously you need to change ‘username’ for your own username :)

Using Rowan’s example it would look like this:

http://www.surfarama.com/tm/movieshack

There’s nothing fancy about this, it just shows a listing of the users current auctions by title, current bid, number of bids and end date in super simple html format which should be digestable by any decent mobile browser.

Now I’m thinking about a quick RSS conversion tool to spit out the same as RSS (or ATOM), which could then be repurposed in a load of different ways…but I half expect someone will have done this by the time I hit the post button.

Feedback welcome.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long…using Yahoo! Pipes MiramarMike has given us a way monitor your Trade Me listings via RSS. Excellent.

With an RSS feed of course you can do all sorts of things like syndicate on your own site via a service like feedroll.com or feeddigest.com, or convert it to txt message alerts with a service like zaptxt.com or to IM alerts via immedi.at, or add it to your winkSITE account for access on your mobile. Don’t you just love RSS!