I was rather bored today, so I finally decided to start working on a project I had been thinking about for a few months: OwlLibrary.

OwlLibrary is going to be a piece of software I can use to keep track of my collection of books. I have yet to write a single line of code for the OL webservice or UI, but I did import all of the data about my books, thank god for the CueCats.

Seriously. Them CueCat thangs are one of the most useful inventions of the 90s. I can’t see why they never caught one; one quick hardware hack and you had a run-of-the-mill barcode scanner!

Using Alexandria (some shitty application written in Ruby that chokes and dies when it sees Spanish characters and stores books in YAML), I scanned in the ISBNs for everything and pulled down the title/authors/publisher, etc. Then I wrote a script to mog through the YAMLs and crap some horrible data into MySQL. From there, I cleaned it up and made it look sane.

If you want more information about the process or end result, you can check out AlexEx, which is my shitty package with tonight’s work in it. The script I used is a complete and utter hack; I know. Shut the hell up, it was a quick job to get things done.

I have to add some stuff tomorrow. I hope to support genre and series groupings before I start on the webservice or the UI.