Surely this is nothing more than an advert for an amazon (and other) affiliate site? Saying "not an original idea" doesn't give carte blanche to basically spam a site.
How is it any different than any other block that curates content and advertises with affiliates or direct sponsors?
In other news, I got a lot of practice making categorized content which will come in handy for my other projects. I learned a lot about Modified Preorder Tree Traversal in MySQL, which is pretty neat. Sorry to offend, I was excited about building something fun. Have you built anything lately, even just to learn something new?