Delicious Library

Delicious Library is an outstanding Mac OS X program for organizing personal book, movie, and CD collections. It's a little pricey at $40, but it's worth the dollars if you own a lot of media and are somewhat obsessive-compulsive. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a great way to export the data to the web. This page will tell you how to convert your Delicous Library into a MediaWiki table, suitable for use on the Books You're Welcome To Borrow page.

First, you need to download this Perl script: DeliciousExporter.pl. (You may need to control-click and say "Save As...".)

Now open up a Terminal. It can be found in /Applications/Utilities. We're going to run this script, which will find your Delicious Library and put the information about books in a nice pretty format. First "cd" into the folder where the script is. If it's on your Desktop, you'll type

cd Desktop

But it could be somewhere else. Anyway, now we're going to try to run it:

perl DeliciousExport.pl

You might get an error about not being able to find HTML::Template or something like that. That's OK, it's not too hard to download. Type

perl -MCPAN -e install HTML::Template HTML::Template::XPath

Follow the set-up prompts, if you get them. They're kind of scary, but if you use the defaults you'll be just fine. CPAN, by the way, is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, and it makes it really easy to download Perl libraries that do useful things. (After the initial configuration, anyway.) If you actually open up DeliciousExport.pl, you'll notice it's pretty short. Most of the work is done by CPAN libraries.

Once the libraries are finished installing, run it again:

perl DeliciousExport.pl

It'll ask you for your name, the location of the books, and your Unix ID. This information is used to make the format consistent with the Books You're Welcome To Borrow page. If you want a different format, like plain HTML, you can of course open up the script and poke around. It's only 35 lines of code, so you should be able to figure out what's going on, even if you don't know Perl. Also, you can change the script to spit out your movies or CDs instead of books. Just change "/library/items/book" to "/library/items/movie" or "/library/items/music" on line 18.

By default, the script will print to the Terminal window. That's actually not very useful. If you want it to show up in a TextEdit window, from which you can copy it into the web browser, type

perl DeliciousExport.pl | open -f

If you have any problems, please post here, and of course feel free to clarify or expand these instructions.