So far I managed to found one more addition to Mambo: a module to keep track of all the books I own. Although this thing exists its still under heavy development but so far there seems to be no support for Dutch books (nor any intention of adding it).
So I decided to see if I couldn’t come up with a way to create my own book gallery. It seems the Mambo API is forthcoming enough to plug anything in without trouble (haven’t found db access yet but that shouldn’t be too hard).
The next big problem is the source for book information. I’m not parsing Amazon yet because the other parser had that one covered, rather I decided to parse www.bol.com. This site offers books in lotsa languages, including Dutch and English and if I’m not mistaken I can flip the parser to another language by changing 2 parameters so I instantly have at least 2 languages covered. Next on my list are www.play.com and finally www.amazon.com. That should provide enough coverage for pretty much every book I own.
I’m calling it a night after writing the english bol.com parser, after fighting with regular expressions and the overwhelming lack of documentation for the ereg function (the lads at php should learn that including some debug options would be really really nice for something more than parsing a freaking date) I threw in the towel and resorted to the down and dirty parsing by looking for HTML tags and splitting the whole result page that way. Works like a charm but its really dirty as adding one tag or moving one kills the script.
Ah well, this is work in progress anyway 🙂
For the impatient visitor: Click here – please remember that this is a draft, nothing close to a working concept…
Welcome to my new site. Once more a switch from CMS.