There is something very nice about liberating your data. For instance take predictable html structure, and xpath, and you get a nice way to screen scrape. I've been working on creating a mobile version of an OPAC for a little while and I came across some premade solutions from other Libraries but each one seemed to be missing a few pieces of information that I want in my mobile display. So I got the great idea to screen scrape and evaluate the results with XPath.
Much like many other sites my University has an iTunesU presence that hosts some media and interesting tidbits from events and classes here at Brock. The only hitch (as the name implies) is that this nifty media collection is served up via iTunes. Further to the application lock-in there is no easy way to authenticate to the service directly via iTunes, so in most cases any school that wishes to get their users into the service need to write up an authentication system and host it on local web-space. Once some local authentication is done you construct a POST to iTunes and if all goes well iTunes will shell open on the system you're on and you'll be recognized as a member of your institution. This post is a look at one way to create this login.
By going off the books it is possible to add some javascript to a typical III Catalogue and get a very neat 'Send to Cell Phone' feature. Going along with the suggestions on the page I modified the script (sms.pl) and changed it into PHP. I even added a tiny amount of statistical gathering. My thought is if this thing is very popular it might be worth creating more interesing options. Something along the lines of 'Send this to an email address' or 'Recommend this to a friend'. Anyway here is my version of sms.php:
Subversion is a great utility that will make code development a lot easier. Basically it is a repository that keeps track of the versions of files and allows for many people to simulatenously work on one project. There might be some top heavy work at the begining but it is well worth it. Everything is packaged nicely for Ubuntu so there really isn't much work. This install will put absolutely no security measures on the repository so use cautiously. The base install only allows for command line access to the repository so we'll also look at putting a web GUI on top of if.
There is something very nice about liberating your data. For instance take predictable html structure, and xpath, and you get a nice way to screen scrape. I've been working on creating a mobile version of an OPAC for a little while and I came across some premade solutions from other Libraries but each one seemed to be missing a few pieces of information that I want in my mobile display. So I got the great idea to screen scrape and evaluate the results with XPath.
