Some recent discussions of Delicious Library and LibraryThing on Rich’s blog, got me thinking about a project I started just over a year ago. It did not progress very far, and I do not think I worked on it much (if at all) since, but I figured I should at least share what I have with the world. Maybe some intrepid soul will want to continue where I left off.
Delicious Library stores its database of media in an XML file. While this kind of sucks for load times on a large library, it is most excellent for making that data accessible. I wrote up a quick XSL (weboutput.xsl) that exports my books and movies as a large list of items in an HTML file. Each item links to a detail page, and that’s where the work stopped. The list on the front page is rather raw, and the content on the detail pages is virtually nonexistent. If you want to take a peek at what books and movies I own, Czech this out: https://netninja.com/media/
My wish-list of features would include:
- An alphabet at the top of each book/movie section to jump to a particular letter.
- Better (or any) use of DIVs and IDs and class names and such so that the thing can be made pretty with CSS.
- Actual details on the detail page, including a thumbnail of the cover.
Incidentally, I mentioned the LibraryThing social networking and recommendations to the Delicious Library folks. I got a terse email back that thanked me for the feedback and mysteriously suggested I keep my eyes open for a new version around when Leopard comes out (because it, maybe, requires Leopard-specific features?) that “should blow some socks off.”
Yeah. done some hinting that it’s pretty far along (Including giving away 2.0 coupons as contest prizes.). I’d guess it has some coreanimation ties.
What? you have to close html tags now? (oops)