Howto: Music album covers in Thunar Nautilus and everywhere!

[Nonno Bassotto]

Let me add also that I have some problem with the anobii and imdb grabbers: both don't find any link. I'm using Firefox; possibly it has something to do with Firefox 3 and its new way to manage bookmarks? I think they are inside a sqlite file now... I can save a html file with all my links, but I don't know how to tell Avatar-Factory to use that file.

Edit: I could trick Avatar-Factory into importing the bookmarks by manually substituting the bookmarks.html file, but I'm not sure if a more elegant solution exists.

I should also add that I have some problems with bookmarks whose contains an apostrophe ('). In the html file saved by Firefox it is escaped as & # 39; (no spaces) but it is not correctly replaced by Avatar-Factory.

[Nonno Bassotto]

I see Anobii published an API to retrieve user data within an application. If you are interested I may investigate on that and try to integrate that into AvatarFactory. Basically you just call a dedicated URL and get the data you want about books in XML.

[Crafty Kisses]

Nice tutorial! Thanks for all the tips and what not.

[Yuzem]

Sorry I have not been here for long... Thank you for all the improvements! Sadly the Nautilus team seems to work against you

Hello Nonno! Nice to see you here again. Sorry I didn't answer before. I didn't get a notification...
Yes, a lot of things got broken with the latest nautilus...

I just tried the command line way and it works!!! Still I think there's something wrong with the gui, since it doesn't let me choose the icon size.

I can't reproduce the problem. It is working fine on my computer. I will try again in another computer.

Moreover the icon-size option has no effect when used with the music grabber and the --folders option.

That is a bug.

Let me add also that I have some problem with the anobii and imdb grabbers: both don't find any link. I'm using Firefox; possibly it has something to do with Firefox 3 and its new way to manage bookmarks? I think they are inside a sqlite file now... I can save a html file with all my links, but I don't know how to tell Avatar-Factory to use that file.

Edit: I could trick Avatar-Factory into importing the bookmarks by manually substituting the bookmarks.html file, but I'm not sure if a more elegant solution exists.

Yes, here

I should also add that I have some problems with bookmarks whose contains an apostrophe ('). In the html file saved by Firefox it is escaped as & # 39; (no spaces) but it is not correctly replaced by Avatar-Factory.

I fixed that for the youtube grabber in the latest version, I will do the same for the others.

I see Anobii published an API to retrieve user data within an application. If you are interested I may investigate on that and try to integrate that into AvatarFactory. Basically you just call a dedicated URL and get the data you want about books in XML.

Do you mean, to create a gui dialog with the data or something like that?

[Nonno Bassotto]

Yes, here

Fine, this solves the bookmarks issue. Maybe you could mention it in the instructions.

Do you mean, to create a gui dialog with the data or something like that?

What I mean is that now one could create a anobii-account grabber. A user could give the id of his account to the grabber and avatar-factory would create the avatars for all books in the shelf, without the need to create a bookmark for each book.

This page shows that, once you have a Anobii API account, you can use a dedicated URL to retrieve the list of all books in the shelf, in XML format. Actually for each book you only get the id; then you use this other method to get the title and the cover.

[Nonno Bassotto]

By the way, one could use something like XMLStarlet to parse the XML output, so the new grabber would be very simple. This would add a new dependency to avatar-factory, but one can just ignore it if he doesn't need the new grabber. Moreover the same thing could be done for other social websites (like IMDB itself, or flixster...) as soon as they provide a similar API.

[Yuzem]

Fine, this solves the bookmarks issue. Maybe you could mention it in the instructions.

I will.

What I mean is that now one could create a anobii-account grabber. A user could give the id of his account to the grabber and avatar-factory would create the avatars for all books in the shelf, without the need to create a bookmark for each book.

This page shows that, once you have a Anobii API account, you can use a dedicated URL to retrieve the list of all books in the shelf, in XML format. Actually for each book you only get the id; then you use this other method to get the title and the cover.

Oh, I see... I am not sure how to implement this since I am planning to change the way bookmark grabbers work.
Now it is:

avatar-factory -g anobii destination

I want to implement something like:

avatar-factory -g anobii source destination

Where source could be firefox, opera, epiphany, a list of links file and I could add your idea here. This way no additional grabber will be needed.

By the way, one could use something like XMLStarlet to parse the XML output, so the new grabber would be very simple. This would add a new dependency to avatar-factory, but one can just ignore it if he doesn't need the new grabber. Moreover the same thing could be done for other social websites (like IMDB itself, or flixster...) as soon as they provide a similar API.

XMLStarlet seems great. I didn't know about it.
I read a little the docs and it seems a like complex (I have almost no experience in XML)
I think that I can use sed for this.
Do you mean for example, to grab the links from a page like this
I can get the links with:

wget -qO - http://www.anobii.com/cyesuta/books | sed -e 's/<a href="/\n/g' -e '/\/books\//!d' -e 's/".*$//g' | sed -e '/\/books\//!d' -e 's|^|http://www.anobii.com|'

[Nonno Bassotto]

I think your way to extract the data will not work with more than ten books, since they will end up on the next pages.

I think what you need to parse XML is just something like the following command

xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//item" -v "@id" -n shelf.xml

This should output the list of ids, one for each line. By the way, I just copied the second example here.

Anyway, mine was just a suggestion, to avoid manual parsing of the XML (or HTML) file.

[Hells_Dark]

When i add movies, the icon stay small for a while.. weird.
killall nautilus fix it.. again :/

[Yuzem]

[QUOTE=Nonno Bassotto;5697028]I think your way to extract the data will not work with more than ten books, since they will end up on the next pages.[/URL]
You are right, twelve actually.

I think what you need to parse XML is just something like the following command

xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//item" -v "@id" -n shelf.xml

This should output the list of ids, one for each line. By the way, I just copied the second example here.

Anyway, mine was just a suggestion, to avoid manual parsing of the XML (or HTML) file.

If I understand this correctly, first I use the user id to get the books ids and then I get the books proprieties with the books ids but how do I get the user id?

When i add movies, the icon stay small for a while.. weird.
killall nautilus fix it.. again :/

Yes, this is because the icon size option is set for each file not for all files in a specific folder. This is how nautilus works.
It is strange that you have to killall nautilus every time. Try closing all nautilus windows, then add a movie and then open the avatars folder.
That works in my computer, even closing the window and open it again works. Some times you just have to wait a little.