P@ Log

Last friday we released an HTML API for Google Checkout.

This is a middle ground between the pregenerated static ‘Buy Now’ Buttons and the XML API that most people would implement on the server side. You just build a form with a list of hidden fields and an image to represent the button. No more XML, HMAC_SHA1 signature or Base64 encoding needed.

I started working on a Google Checkout Generator. It’s a simple HTML/Javascript (look Ma, no server side!) application created using the delicious Google Web Toolkit, which 1.2 release last week added Mac support (I can now enjoy it).

Use it at your own risk: it’s very much a work in progress.

What is does is let you dump your catalog in CSV format in a textarea, specify your merchantId, then generate one Google Checkout Button per product. Each button has a textarea next to it with the html code for the button, for easy copying and pasting to a web page.

Next steps:

• set default values for some fields that you will then be able to omit from the csv
• be able to customize each button individually
• Open source the code

This little page could come in handy for small merchants using static html pages for their catalog: get a cvs dump of your catalog, maybe tweaking it to have the required columns, press the generate button, copy and paste in your web page.
I’m interested in feedback: what other functionalities would you need from this app?