I was at the Ann Arbor blogger meetup last night, talking with mitten about movies. She said that when it comes time to look up movies to check out from the library she keeps two windows open: one on IMDB and one on the AADL site.
I thought about this a bit and went looking for a way to make it a little easier. Here's the first try. It's based on The Movie Dude, a Greasemonkey script that adds links to Netflix, Yahoo, Amazon, and IMDB movie reviews when you are on any of those sites.
A little bit of surgery and I was able to add in support for the AADL, at least for going from IMDB etc to the AADL. In the opposite direction I couldn't see any easy way to parse out the title of the movie from the HTML that the catalog provides.
If you want to give it a try, no guarantees, see
http://www.superpatron.com/moviedude15-aadl.user.js
You'll need Greasemonkey and Firefox to try this out.
My dream going in was to give a live accounting of not just whether the library had a title but also how many holds there were on it and what branch it was at if it was in - I think that's within the realm of reason if I can find someone who has already done an RSS in Javascript module that I can borrow.
Still experimenting.
UPDATE 6/06: Movie Dude has been updated to cover a few more sites; this script might be improved by syncing up with the current release.
New category "library mashups" added.
Technorati Tags: firefox, greasemonkey, library, mashup, mashups, moviedude
Great idea! But file not found...
Posted by: Matt Blackcustard | 12 January 2006 at 09:48 AM
Interesting stuff. I am not sure what RSS support you are looking for, but you can certainly use the XML parser object in Firefox to parse RSS. Google found this site where someone talks about doing just that: http://www.captain.at/howto-ajax-parse-rss.php
Posted by: Mark Smith | 12 January 2006 at 01:21 PM