Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator

Carnegie Library 's email notification system leaves much to be desired. It only notifies you after an item is overdue, giving you no chance to return the item on time. Also, when you request an item, you don't receive an email notification that the item is available until a few days after it is ready. However, your account information web page updates immediately after the item is ready.

To solve these problems, I've been working on a Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator for the past few months. It works by screen-scraping your account information web page. By doing this, it can add entries to your feed a few days before a checked out item is due and immediately after a requested item is available.

This feed generator was mainly written for my personal use, but since some other people might also useful, I'm pleased to make it publicly available. If you decide to use it, please send me feedback and suggestions, so that I can improve it in the future.

(Sidenote: The feed generator was also an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails . Ruby and Rails are both fun to work with. As a desktop application developer, I used to loathe web apps due to the prevalence of spaghetti code. Rails makes it very easy to create a cleanly factored Model-View-Controller application, so I plan to use it for all of my future web development needs.)