I’ve been using Delicious Library for a while now and have been incredibly happy with the results. I even managed to figure out which books I had on loan and more importantly discovered I was missing some books from my collection!
The other thing I’d been playing with was including some books on this site that I like. You may have noticed them down the side. There is a bit of PHP code behind the pictures, but I still need to add in the Amazon id number for each book.
My aim is to use Delicious Library to keep track of my physical media, including rating it, and to publish the highest rated media onto the site. Given that Library is basically a thick client built on top of Amazon, I could even include my referrer link, so if anyone buys anything I get a small commission to feed my book buying habits.
Library supports exporting its catalog as a tab separated file. I had hoped for an ‘Export to XML’ option, so it would be simple XSL transform and tada!
Given the Python focus of this site, it didn’t take long before I had a workable script up and running.
The important bits of the script are included below:
from Kid import *
import sys
def normalizeString(str):
return str.replace('//', '/').replace('/ ',
'<br/>').replace('*','<br/>*')
file = open(sys.argv[1], 'rb')
for line in file:
lines.append(line[:-1])
headings = lines[0].split('\t')
books = [dict(zip(headings, normalizeString(line).split('\t'))) for line in lines[1:]]
Template(file='template.kid', books=books).serialize()
The Template object is from the Kid template library, which is
responsible for generating the resultant XHTML. The template.kid file
that I used iterates through the list of dictionaries of books and
displays as links the ones that I’ve given a rating of (5/5).
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:py='http://purl.org/kid/ns#'>
<head><title>Delicious Library</title></head>
<body>
<ul>
<li py:for='book in books' py:if="book['rating'] == '5'">
<a py:attrs="href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/' +
book['asin'] +
'/pseudofish-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1'">
${book['title']}
</a>
</li>
</ul>
</body></html>
The end result, is that I can now add books into Library as I purchase and read them, and if I rate the book highly enough then it will turn up on this blog.
Source code and samples are available here. Requires Delicious Library (full or demo) and Kid.