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QR Code Hacks

A lightning talk on QR codes at Access last week reminded me that just prior to the Boston Mashathon I did a nifty mashup using the RSS feed from the Developer Network Application Gallery and the Google Chart API. I wanted to mass generate QR Codes for all the web addresses of the applications in the Application Gallery to put them in attendee's badges at the Boston Mashathon. I found a QR code generate where I could perform this task one by one. However, I wanted something way more efficient since there are now over 60 applications in the gallery. I discovered that the Google Chart API has a way to generate QR codes easily. The next thing I needed was a way to get the URLs for all the applications out of the Application gallery so I could easily loop through it and build QR codes. Drupal has a dead easy way to do this. You just use Views to create an RSS feed that includes all the applications. The feed will have the name of the application as the Title and the url in the Link element. Once I had the feed I could use a PHP script to parse it and build the code on the fly. The result was a tabular web page that listed all the application names and their QR code. Saving the page and all its accompanying files to my hard drive gave me all the QR code images. You can see below that the code for producing the QR codes is pretty simple. I could have also written the PHP to just download the image files using curl to a folder on my hard drive but this approach was simpler and also let me display the codes in a web page to check to make sure they were being properly created. If you want to see the page in action you can check in out at http://www.librarywebchic.net/mashups/QR_code_page.php . Be patient the QR codes take a bit of time to load. This demo shows just how easy it is to use data from an RSS feed to produce QR codes. I can imagine a library potentially sending out a New Books list brochure that uses QR codes to link readers of the brochure back to information about a specific book and allow them to place a hold for that book.
Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 5:38pm
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New demos for Access presentation

I'm presenting on OCLC Web Services at Access this week and I wanted to have some new stuff to show off at the conference. As a result, I wrote two new demos which show off OCLC Web Services and other APIs. One demo is an extension of the code I wrote at the Boston Mashathon.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 8:54am
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Developer Network hangs out at Access

Roy, Ralph and I traveled to Winnipeg for the Access conference this week. We all participated in the Hackfest and Ralph and I are presenting. My talk is on how OCLC Web Services can be used to improve library UIs. Ralph is giving a talk on the OCLC open source Linked Data framework that powers are services like VIAF. We're having a great time a the conference so far. We helped build cool things at the Hackfest. I worked on a project in which I had to take data from Solr and create charts with it using the Google Chart API. Roy helped with a project called "Mobile Death Hack". You can check out the prototype at http://mobiledeath.wallandbinkley.com/ . I had some favorite presentations from the first day of the conference as well. These included Dan Scott's talk on Standard Social Sharing and Aggregation on the Go, was also good and gave me new standards to check out and learn about. Today will be more great presentations and the rest of the Hackfest reports. I'm looking forward to seeing what folks have to show off and learning about interesting projects which libraries are doing.
Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 8:34am
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EZproxy version 5.3 now available

While EZproxy isn't a Web service, a lot of developers/Web people are also tasked with maintaining the library's authentication servers. Thus, we always want to let you know the latest and greatest with identity management, authentication and authorization services. So the latest version, 5.3 is now available on OCLC.org. Here are the details about the enhancements:
  • A new function, Length, returns the number of characters in a string. This functionality is helpful in complex user.txt configurations for verifying and parsing strings. See an example from the official announcement.
  • EZproxy V5.3 now supports the latest Shibboleth Version 2.1 Identity Providers (IdPs) for authentication. This move expands the number of Shibboleth IdPs available to an even wider range--all IdPs from V1.3 forward are now supported.
  • A new option, Option CookiePassThrough, passes ALL cookies through EZproxy to the user's browser. Adding this option provides wider flexibility for the service to work with additional Web sites that may require a cookie to be set.
  • LOGFORMAT now returns the correct number of bytes transferred for https connections. This correction will help libraries more accurately track usage statistics for EZproxy-enabled sessions.
  • There were a number of additional minor fixes to improve the overall stability of EZproxy.
See the full list of changes Upgrade to 5.3 Also note two things:
  1. a hosted version of EZproxy is in pilot and the reports back from libraries using it are quite good. So stay tuned to hear more when hosted EZproxy is ready for production in your library...
  2. As soon as testing is complete, version 5.3.1 will come out that supports NCIP authentication even more fully than v5.3 does today.
Submitted by alicesneary on Wed, 10/13/2010 - 12:40pm
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Boston Mashathon wrap up coming soon

WorldCat Mashathon Boston group photoWow, hard to believe it's been a week since the Mashathon in Boston. Time flies when you're busy mashing. Or coding.

Submitted by alicesneary on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 9:11am
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Boston Mashathon, Day One

Everyone's working hard at Boston MashathonThe first day of this two-day event has had its ups and downs. On the "up" side attendees absorbed a lot of information about OCLC Web Services and are now (even as I write this) working away in small groups on particular ideas (see photo).

Submitted by rtennant on Thu, 09/23/2010 - 3:23pm
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WorldCat Mashathon Boston in full swing

The morning has gone fast here in Boston. We've got a great group of developers, UI people and idea generators here--with mobile specialists, a freelance developer, an oceanography representative and an astrophysics representative too. Not to mention lots of developers who work in libraries in and around the Boston area. We did a quick tally for skills/programming languages in the room. Here's the run down: UI- 3 people Perl -10 people Javascript- 9 people Java- 9 people PHP-14 people Shell script-1 person Ruby-4 people C sharp- 2 people ASP.net- 3 people SQL-LOTS XSLT-LOTS XML-LOTS Lots of Python, Perl and Drupal users, too.
Submitted by alicesneary on Thu, 09/23/2010 - 11:47am
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WorldCat Mashathon Boston only 2 weeks away!

bostonmashathonthumbnail.jpgIf you've been dragging your feet on signing up for the WorldCat Mashathon Boston, then time to get in gear. We're set to have a great two days with lots of good ideas floating around. Plus the setting at the Microsoft NERD Center...or maybe the view of the Charles River...is sure to inspire.

Submitted by alicesneary on Thu, 09/09/2010 - 5:21pm
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Developer Network site redesign

As some of you may already have noticed, Developer Network has a redesigned website and a new web address - http://www.oclc.org/developer . The site is a ground up redesign. We've changed the technology, design, and improved the content. The redesign is intended to give you easier-to-use documentation of OCLC Web Services, as well as provide an enhanced space for developers to contribute to the growing Developer Network community.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 4:21pm
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Developer collaboration leads to implementation of NCIP 2.0

Early this spring, a community of library developers interested in interoperability between discovery interfaces and integrated library systems formed a working group to build on the work of the DLF ILS-DI Task force. After several months of collaboration between this developer community and OCLC team members, we are excited to announce our plans to contribute an implementation of version 2.0 of the NCIP standard, derived from the OCLC Web-scale Management Services codebase, to the eXtensible Catalog's open-source NCIP Toolkit. This contribution will advance the library community's efforts to simplify interoperability options for any library or software provider that wishes to include item availability and other information from the integrated library system in its discovery interface display. With the contribution of this open-source code, OCLC will help to extend the great work of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) development group with support for NCIP 2.0. The first contribution, expected this month, will support the NCIP Lookup Item service, which was determined to be the highest priority for the ILS-DI Task Force. Support for this message enables libraries to retrieve item status from their ILS in real time, making it possible for third-party discovery interfaces such as the eXtensible Catalog, VuFind and WorldCat Local to incorporate this in their displays to patrons. Following this initial release, OCLC will work in conjunction with the Task Force members to establish a project plan to expand both the number of supported NCIP 2.0 services and ILS connection components. The software will be licensed under the MIT License, which allows for commercial reuse. To learn more about this contribution, please contact Randall Cook of the eXtensible Catalog project (rcook@library.rochester.edu) or Karen A. Coombs, Product Manager for the OCLC Developer Network (coombsk@oclc.org).
Submitted by librarywebchic on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 9:22am
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