So, I decided to announce my 130 Challenge in style and got to work to ensure that everything was just right. I am sort of a perfectionist, but a lazy one. So it’s always a struggle for me to keep it balanced. Anyway, after writing the introductory post to the challenge, I set out to get the list of all the books I’m going to read. Now, these books are over at Goodreads, and there was no option to get just the titles, so I copied all the content from the ‘My Books’ page and dumped it on a text file.
Then I started copying and pasting titles from there to the page listing all the books I’m going to read – To gobble. Unfortunately, after copying 2 titles, my laziness kicked in and I decided that there had to be a better way to do this.
So, I decided, I will write a program to do this for me :D
For those who will jump at every opportunity to say ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’, here’s the proof:
The top window has the code and the bottom has the results. I’m a stickler for coding standards.
After 5 minutes of furious coding (read Googling how to read text files line by line), I was done and I was mighty pleased with the results. That is, till my perfectionism kicked in again.
I felt that mere title names were inadequate and that I should add links too. I Googled for a way to get hyperlinks from a webpage and spent close to 15 minutes going through the documentation for Java. Then just as I was about to give up, thinking that it won’t be worth the effort, I saw the print option on my Goodreads shelf. After clicking on it, I was taken to a page where I could decide what to display. A few clicks later, I had a list of all titles with links that I could just copy-paste and use on my blog.
Face, meet palm!
Aamil Syed 