A few months ago, I finally got around to cataloging all my books using Delicious Library. There were a few reasons for doing this – my insurance company wants a list of all the books in order to insure them for new-replacement value (rather than the few cents they probably consider they are worth), if anything did happen to them, I want to be able to print out a list and give it to a bookstore with an insurance cheque an wait for all the boxes to arrive, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s becoming difficult to purchase new books because I have to remember whether I’ve already got the book (or have just read it, or have just heard of it). It’s also just about impossible for anyone else to buy me a book (my favourite gift), because I might already have it (unless it’s on my Amazon wish-list, which I keep fairly up-to-date). I guess it’s also nice to keep track of books I’ve lent out, but that isn’t so common that I need software for it.

Just putting the books in the Delicious database covers most of these, apart from the issue of avoiding purchasing duplicates. Delicious Library can sync to an iPod (I don’t have one, but my wife does, so with a bit of work copying the library across accounts, that can be done), so that somewhat solves the issue of buying duplicates myself. It’s not perfect, though – for a start, I need to ensure that I have the iPod with me (easy to do for planned purchases, but not impulse buys). In addition, it seems that only 1000 books were sync’d – I’m not sure if the iPod is limited in the length of “notes” it can display, or if Delicious Library is limited in the number of books it can sync, or if something just went wrong in the process. This doesn’t at all help anyone else, of course, unless I give them a list.

Putting the list online is possible, through third-party utilities, but the one that I found that worked resulted in a page with so many images it would take forever to load, and while I put a custom-made version online that would load more quickly, printing the list out and taking it with you, or waiting until you could look at it online, isn’t particularly practical.

What I needed was a way to query the list using something that I and others would always have on hand. That’s really only a cellphone, either via voice (complex) or SMS (simple). ipipi, which I used in the past to send SMS messages from a computer, allows me to receive email from an SMS, which I could use to trigger an Applescript. While I could probably have done the whole job in Applescript, writing the search in Python was much simpler. Continue reading “Delicious Library queries via SMS” →