Howto: import your allconsuming.net content to alexandria

So I have a problem right? Alexandria is a nifty little application for listing the books you have as a digital library. Allconsuming used to fill that niche, and I've invested a lot of time into it.

So, this should be easy, right? Web 2.0 should mean webservices are exploding out of every possible port... right?

Not so! The information that is there isn't very useful - not even the RSS feeds really allow you to get structured data out.

But there is a way, be it quick and dirty.

First, check you've got Alexandria

sudo -s apt-get install alexandria

Next, go to your Allconsuming javascript setup page. Make sure you've logged in.

You see the script tag mentioned there? Grab it, and change it.

My original one was:
http://allconsuming.net/person/CloCkWeRX/js/all/3

and I now change it to:
http://allconsuming.net/person/CloCkWeRX/completed_js/all/300

Next, I visit the url in my browser, firefox.

I choose to save the page somewhere - call it `export`. We don't care about this page, really, but about the images attached. All of these images (in a handy fashion) are stored as an ASIN, and a file extension. An ASIN is an amazon product code, which handily defaults to an ISBN for books.

Firefox will put this saved page somewhere, like ~/, so whip open a terminal.

cd ~/export_files/
ls > export.txt

Open export.txt in gedit or similar, and replace all of the '.jpg' with '', then save.

Finally, open up Alexandria, and choose 'import'. Select a type of 'isbn list', and navigate to ~/export_files/export.txt

Done! You'll get a few importing errors, no doubt, and Alexandria isn't the best to give you informative errors... but you've just got your library into your library manager.

Bookfeed, Dailylit

John Anquino has found a none-broken bookfeed.

Please hassle me to fix bookfeed and make it friendly.

Bookshelf

I've been in a very bookish mood of late. I've churned through countless books over christmas. My room is covered in piles of dusty books I love. My girlfriend has even caught the fever and is reading at a tremendous rate.

I've been fooling around in some shady things. Like clit. Ahem. Convert Lit. I've also been looking at OeB - a 'standard' for the ebook industry.

Rubbishy standard. Everyone takes an OEB and them DRMs it to SFA. (Translation: OeB isn't used as plain OeB, making me think what is the point?)

Book people just don't get metadata. Librarians kind of do. But book makers, particularly ebook makers, don't really. ISBN? Use it as a what? International identifying number for my work? Why ever should I do that! BAH!
I'll use a GUID. Globally Unique Identifier. Yes, that's it.

Luckily, Amazon provides fixes for this; title based lookup for ISBN.

To that end, I've begun some work. On a Bookshelf. It's in C#, my first decent C# undertaking. There's nothing much at the moment to it, just an OEB Serializer and Unserializer class. Work enough in itself!

Browse the CVS if you care to.

On a cooler note, I found generation5.org. Generation5 is all about AI, and I found it while googling for LSystems and Virtual Plants. I was wowed at how easy it was to do much of this. The math isn't hard. Neural Nets are fairly simple to construct, and training seems the hardest part. The coolest-thing-ever was the article on ISBN reading from scanned barcodes via webcam. I'd only ever seen this mentioned before in relation to an Apple application. That is definately on the list of cool things to hack. I'm too lazy to find the link for either.

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