Launching Sandvox
When you launch Sandvox, you see a window with preview of what your website will look like. We will put some amazon content on the sidebar at the right of the page.
A tour of Sandvox's use of Amazon Web Services
When you launch Sandvox, you see a window with preview of what your website will look like. We will put some amazon content on the sidebar at the right of the page.
From the popup menu, we choose the item to indicate that we want an "Amazon List".
The pagelet has been added to the sidebar but there are no products yet. The Sandvox user can customize the title of the pagelet, and insert other information if desired.
Here is the inspector for that pagelet we just created. The Amazon-specific content is in the bottom half of the inspector window.
Note that we can pick one of six amazon stores; have a list generated "by hand" (where you specify products in this interface); the alternative (below) is an Amazon list, like ListMania! or a wish list.
Here I have added some products to the list via drag and drop; you can also enter information at the bottom of the window to look up the product; for each product, we allow an author comment as well.
Here is one way (of many; see display options below) that the proucts that the user picked in the inspector will appear on the web page.
From the inspector, the user has a number of options for display. The segmented control allow for variations of layout; the last two are for Enhanced Display and for a "shuffle" of Enhanced Display as described here.
For display of each product, the Sandvox user can put a white frame around each thumbnail, good for when the web page's background is dark. There are options for what attributes to show for each product. (Note that "Prices" is disabled here for all formats except for Enhanced Display and shuffle, since it's not "live" data.)
Finally, note that the Sandvox user can choose to include product previews as well.
This is an example of Enhanced Display after that option has been set in the inspector.
If the Sandvox user chooses "From Amazon" in the inspector, he/she can enter a list ID. The list is loaded and the contents displayed in the inspector.
Note that with an Amazon list, it's possible to show price information even when the display is not Enhanced Display, because the contents of the list is actually served by a karelia.com server, which fetches "live" information about the list and relays it to the web page. There can also be a link generated to view the entire list at the amazon site.
Here's a resulting page, as shown in the browser. The viewer of the website can click on the images or text links and visit them on the amazon.com (or amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk, etc.) store.