Experiments in Life

Much like Misty, I started cataloging all of Ashley and my books into Delicious Library. So far, I have processed the bookshelf in our dining room. Here is the breakdown so far:

• 170 books scanned.
• 95 books are mine.
• 75 books are Ashley’s.

Today, I did not care to start scanning books again — that is an arduous task. Perhaps later tonight I will start on our bedroom. Instead, I started playing around with the export capabilities of Delicious Library with the ultimate goal of getting our library linked as a page off of the site. Basically, Delicious Library exports the entire library as a tab-separated file with the field names as the first line and each following line containing the information for one scanned in item. While that file could be linked off of the site, it would not be very pretty. So, I wrote a small python script to munge the data into XML so that an XSL file could generate a web page from the data. That is working fairly well so far.

I have also found that Delicious Library stores all of its data as XML. So, I am considering just writing some code to transform that file into one containing only the data I am interested in. Either way, expect a new link off of the sidebar soon containing our library contents.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Books, Home Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.