Thursday, April 7, 2011

SparkNotes

I'm reading classicals like Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies.  In Canada we have these yellow cheat books called Coles notes, the equivalent of which we now know as SparkNotes.  Anyways, I'm not part of any book clubs as of now, and unlike before when I was afraid of getting caught of plagiarism, I figure I might as well read up on these notes.  It'll be useful to get another (note, I didn't say correct) interpretation of what I'm reading.  Anyways, SparkNotes only supports the Nook, and being a Kindle lover, I figure I need another way to get at the text on it.  So I'll be writing a simple screen scraper tool using Ruby & Nokogiri to scrape SparkNotes website for the text i'm interested in.  Then I'll transfer it to my Kindle.  I'll mark this is my next skunkworks project...more to come!