Despite several things working against me* I have now populated the On Line Library with the real ALUG library book list.
The contents of the Library now represent all the books currently held by the library, Those who currently have books on loan will have accounts auto-generated as their books are added to the system within the next few days.
Any reservations or bookings made during the testing phase have been removed, however any accounts generated still exist.
Currently the library is resting in my ISP's hosting area
http://cgi.digimatic.plus.com/opendb/
I hope to move it to the ALUG site very shortly (there are still a few minor changes I want to make, and where it is now I have shell access which makes things a bit easier)
When I get a moment I will stick a link at the top of the old ALUG Library page pointing to the Library as the URL is hardly memorable.
Potential borrowers can of course still use the old system of just waiting to the next meet and leafing through the box to see if something interests them (I should be at the kit meeting next month and am going to make an effort to be at the 2nd Thursday thing on the 10th of March, subject to some work commitments)
It should be noted that in the interests of fair play, reservations only count up until the next meeting that I attend, if somebody is at the meeting and wants to borrow a book reserved by somebody that hasn't turned up then I think it only fair that the reservation is overruled, so all reservations do is get you first dibs at a book if you attend the next meeting that I do.
* Firstly when populating the database I decided that rather than manually typing in the ISBN numbers I would use an old barcode reader I had lying around to get the ISBN from the barcode number, naturally in true geek fashion getting this to work actually took longer than typing in the ISBN numbers manually, a feat which I ended up doing anyway as curiously the barcode does not seem in include the last digit of the ISBN.
If someone wants to write me some script that (given a barcode number) looks up the book on amazon and populates the database with the correct title,author,publisher etc then that would be very welcome.
Then I discovered that for some reason the PHP mail function has stopped working (actually it looked more like it had been intentionally disabled) so membership email and other stuff wasn't working. I sent a mail to PlusNet support and it magically reappeared despite their claims that they hadn't switched it off.