Ning Photos + eBay REST API = Instant Embeddable Slideshows

[David Sklar]

Our new "eBay Seller Photos" site makes it a snap to drop an embedded slideshow of your auction photos into your auction pages or anywhere else on the Internet It's a version of our popular Ning Photos site that's been juiced up with some eBay-specific features, all made possible by the eBay REST API.



Getting your own eBay Seller Photos site just takes a few seconds (just like getting your own copy of any Ning site) -- visit http://ebaysellerphotos.ning.com/ and click on the big fat "Get your own" link. Enter your eBay User ID into the configuration panel of your new site, and then your site is automatically populated with photos from all your existing auctions. From there, you can add more photos, generate slideshow embeds for one auction or all your auctions, and edit which photos appear in which slideshows.



The eBay Seller Photos site is a modified version of Ning Photos. It uses a few new eBay REST API functions to work its eBay-related magic. If you're an eBay API developer (or want to be one), the site is a great place to start to see how the basics of the REST API work. Inside your copy of the site, take a look at the file /widgets/photo/lib/helpers/Photo_EbayHelper.php to see what's going on.



Especially when combined with PHP's SimpleXML extension, the eBay REST API is a breeze to work with -- the requests you make to eBay's servers are just regular old GET requests, with assorted query string parameters describing what you're looking for: info about a particular auction, all the auctions listed by a particular user, and so on. The responses are XML documents with a predictable structure, so pulling out the information you need with SimpleXML is easy.