Book Burro refactoring

I've spent most of this weekend refactoring Book Burro (some of you might remember that I poked a bit at it a few weeks ago), so it's less of a pain and hassle to add new book stores and the like. All bits relevant to each site is now in one single place, and it's not a very bothersome business adding a few more sites any more. This is what a section covering all the data for a site can look like now:

{ name: 'Bokus.com', id: 'bokus', hostname: /\bbokus\.com$/i,
  getISBN:/(?:\/|ISBN&FAST=|ISBN=)([0-9X]{10})(\.html)?(\?|&|$)/i,
  bookURL: 'http://www.bokus.com/b/%s.html', ajaxMethod: 'GET', 
  ajaxPrice: '<span class="price">([^<]*)<', priceFix: SEK },

Compact, in the rather Perlish brute-force sense, but the important bit is that it's in one place, rather than scattered throughout the script. You'd be amazed at how much time that saves when adding another site or twelve.

I added a few additional book stores, most on user request, the rest found more or less haphazardly when looking into affiliate programmes across the web, more for the research than looking for rewards. I'm somewhat impressed with the wealth of development time and money put into building cooperative advertisements; I had no idea of the scale these things take before). And halfway into having something ready to roll out, Akademibokandeln somewhat ironically decide to partner up with Bokus.com and my screen scraping from them wreaks havoc. In the all too true words of Jesse Andrews, the original bookburro programmer: "Not everyone has a nice web service like Amazon".

Oh, they are back online again now! You can probably imagine the smug look on my face when updating the Akademibokhandeln part of the script took a whopping two minutes, including testing. Yes. Good thing nobody was here to see it. ;-)

What ate up most of my time, though, was probably getting the window draggable and to suck up the improvements from the Reify version (by Matt McCarthy, mentioned at the bookburro homepage) for Internet Explorer (which should be able to run this, using Turnabout). Figuring it's best to start out with something portable rather than trying to patch it in as an afterthought, I had a good long chase for how to do draggable elements in web pages, until I was pointed to DOM-drag by a nice gentleman who had read good things about it in DHTML Utopia. And indeed that thing works beautifully in both Mozilla, IE and Opera, modern versions of each. At having been written in 2001, nonetheless. That felt safe enough, and though it took a few long hours of adjusting the pretty code to fit a GreaseMonkeyed sandbok, it now seems to work.

(Yes, I ought to have actually tested it in IE and Opera, but I'm figuring it could wait until another day, or be done sooner by other users who don't feel more at home in Mozilla. Your feedback is very welcome; success stories and failures alike.)

Anyway, feel free to try out bookburro version 0.14! I'll start keeping my most recent version on a permalink now, too, and hopefully Jesse will be glad to receive my own improvements so you will find them in the main developoment branch, so to speak.

0.14 also caches the last book you have seen (expiring the cache after an hour, so it's just something to improve the user feel when scooting around, soaking up all the information you can across the book stores out there -- besides being kinder to those sites, of course). The cache is disabled when debug is turned on, which helps development a lot when you make silly mistakes, and find them being... ...cached. ;-)

There are three major things I want to do with this tool next -- adding currency conversion support, a plugin system similar to Mozilla's Search Bar, so you can easily package up and publish your own bookburro information feeds (and even some day expect services to have one, if they sell, rent or lend books similar to how we today expect a good news service to provide an RSS or ATOM feed), and finally to add some grouping of the sites listed in the bookburro popup window (stores, libraries, whatever).

But now it's Sunday, and that means time out for now. Enjoy!

Categories:

• BookBurro
• Greasemonkey
• javascript