Amzamash

Well I finnished my first Mashup. It was quit fun and now I am thinking of explanding some of the ideas. Adding as RSS feed for fiction and adding the feature of if you like this you might like that. This<=>That.

 The mash is between sirsi/dynix, amazon and the good old library card. Thanks to John Blyberg for the card idea

Amzamash
Overview of Amzamash
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Description
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This is a collections of programs that creates a table of book covers and then links these covers
to a more detailed description of the book. It also creates an old fashion library card on the fly.
I used the sirsi/dynix system to get the isbn numbers of the books that were cataloged yesterday.
I then used the amazon webservices to gather the covers and all other information. This information was
then placed in a mysql database. I then used the GD graphics library to create the library cards. The gathering
of the isbn’s was the only processing done on the ILS. I used expect to transfer the file to another computer
running linux to do the bulk of the processing.

Technologies used
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Perl
Php
MySql
Sirsi/Dynix API
HTML
Expect
Amazon’s Web Services
Cron
Apache
Well it is a mashup after all. <smile>
Programs and function
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get_book.pl : This program goes out and gets all the book isbn’s that were cataloged yesterday.
It sorts the isbn’s and then only outputs unique isbn’s It is locationed /usr/local/share/httpd/cgi-bin on foraker.
The output from this program is called isbn.txt

getisbn : This program is an expect script. It automatically ftp’s the isbn.txt file to the linux server called blog.

awslarge.pl : This program does the bulk of the processing. It first initializes the mysql database and resets
the index to 1. It then opens the isbn.txt file and queries the amazon web service. What is resulted is
XML information about the book. This then parses this information and places it into the database.

cardmaker.pl : This program uses the GD library to place text onto the library card image. There is some
formating that needs to be done and a little cleanup on some of the amazon information. The cards are then
created and placed in a dir. /var/www/html/amzamash/libcards .All previous cards from the day before are deleted.

book_wall.php : This program creates the wall of books. Just gets the data from the database. The links over the books pass the isbn to the bookresut.php /var/www/html/amzamash

bookresult.php : This program takes the isbn and gets the associated library card and then displays the other information about the book that was retreived from amazon. /var/www/html/amzamash

Final note
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I plan to use the database to create an RSS feed on fiction. I would also like to add the feature “If you liked this you might like this” The this<=>this feature.