This weekend I finally took some time to work a project that I've been toying with for a while. I built a small app that for now is being known as LibChecker. It's a Flask app which takes a URL to a public Amazon wishlist and searches for each item on the list at my local library (Hennepin County Library, hclib.org). Here's a screenshot of the app in action:

The biggest challenge here was that neither Amazon wishlists nor the library have any sort of API. The app uses the BeautifulSoup library to scrape results. Since this is just screen scraping, there's quite a few ways that it can break or be wrong. The search on the library side is pretty aggressive, stripping out editions and subtitles. Then, it matches against a single author (the library gives back only a single author when in search view). Despite all of this, it does the job that I set out to do here. The links given are to a specific result within a set of search results, so the user can easily browse for related titles if the result isn't quite correct.

The code for this is available on BitBucket. The app has been deployed on OpenShift at libchecker.wyattwalter.com.