Rick Tonoli

Tag: nodejs

  • Solving the problem of forgetting to take back library books, and having fun doing it…

    Problem

    With access to 4 library cards, each with 30 book capacity, that’s a whopping 120 books we can take out. The current “reminder” system from our local library involves emailing you 2 days before it’s due, and then 1 week AFTER it’s due (and you’ve picked up fines). We’re currently sitting at around $20 worth of fines and that’s not good at all.

    Solution

    Throw technology at the problem!

    I built an end to end system using a Python, NodeJS and PushBullet. Allowing me to…

    • access a RESTful service to get info on current taken out books, per library card and…
    • send notifications as books approach due date.

    Here’s how I did it:

    1. Scrape web site for data, using Python with HTMLParser to log in and extract the latest book data from the website, dumping it as a JSON string.
    2. Create a NodeJS service to wrap the Python data request and expose it as a RESTful service.

    Tada… now we get notified via PushBullet (https://www.pushbullet.com/) whenever books are about to become due.

    Code available on GitHub

    Remember, it ain’t pretty, but it works 🙂