Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: SalonHerringWiredFool.Com

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:10/28/1999; 12:32:58 AM
Topic:SalonHerringWiredFool.Com
Msg #:12441 (In response to 12416)
Prev/Next:12440 / 12442

Pat Breitenbach wrote:

I stopped reading here: 'There's nothing unique about Amazon. It's easy to build a site that does what Amazon does, and only mildly challenging to do it better.'

Are you serious?

As a heart attack. The nice thing about a book site is that it poses no significant data-modelling issues because books have been uniquely identified by ISBN essentially forever; it's relatively easy to import, e.g. a book wholesaler's catalog into a good database system like Oracle. Given a good web server, scripting language, and interface to the database, building such a site is a pretty straightforward proposition. You can read all about it, and a lot more, in <http://photo.net/wtr/thebook>.

The hard part is making sure the site stays up 24/7.

I should point out that I now work for ArsDigita, the folks who did, e.g. MIT Press' site, and whose CEO wrote "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing," the online version of which I referred to above.




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