Post a Guide Remotely

Customize the guide-writing experience with a remote posting form.

If you’re a guide-writing junkie or thinking about becoming one, you may want to create your own page so you can control the posting experience for yourself. You can add a guide-writing form to your own web site, customize it, and even offer it to your visitors as a convenience.

The Code

This is just standard HTML, so create a file called remote_guide.html with the following form:

<html>
<body>
<form method=post action="http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/guide-preview/">

<!-- Visible Form Fields -->
Title:<br>
<input type=text name="guide.title" size=50 value=""><br><br>
Qualifications:<br>
<input type=text name="guide.qualifications" size=50 value=""><br><br>
Guide:<br>
<textarea name="guide.text" cols=80 rows=10></textarea><br><br>

<!-- Hidden Form Fields -->
<input type=hidden name="guide.author" value="insert Amazon ID">
<input type=hidden name="guide.format.asin-link" value="<a href=&quot;[RETURN]
/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/102-4471056-3284920&quot;>'%s'</A>">
<input type=hidden name="guide.format.heading-link" value=[RETURN]
"<a href=&quot;#guide.heading.%03d&quot;><b class=sans>%s</b></a>">

<input type="submit" value="Add Guide">
</form>
</body>
</html>

The only changes to Amazon’s form are the addition of the full URL in the form’s action attribute, and of your Amazon ID [Hack #43] to the guide.author hidden field.

Running the Hack

Since the code is standard HTML, you can open remote_guide.html in ...

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