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Delicious Library

No change in size, 20:58, November 9, 2005
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[http://www.delicious-monster.com 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 to Borrow]] page.
First, you need to download this Perl script: [[DeliciousExporterMedia:DeliciousExport.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
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. [http://search.cpan.org 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 It's easy after the initial configuration, anyway.) If you actually open up DeliciousExport.pl, you'll notice it's is actually a pretty shortscript. Most of the work heavy lifting 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 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
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