Adventures in Nerdville

Ohhh the thrill as a night’s hacking journey reaches its culmination. It all started yesterday…

I was doing some work on my Preacher’s computer and in the process, set up Mozilla Thunderbird to work with his shiny new GFYD email address, which for him and the rest of the Church staff, will be replacing their old dusty AOL addresses. I had Tbird running like a dream. It started in the tray as a notifier, checked and sent as either his old and new addresses, the works. So yesterday evening I went to drop his computer off and proudly showed him how to work Thunderbird.

So he says… “where are my contacts?” My heart sunk, I hadn’t even given that a thought.

After searching online a bit, it seemed that the only way to get your contacts out of AOL into a CSV is a pay program (unacceptable) or to just manually type them out (double unacceptable).

<rant>Companies who prey on unsuspecting customers by doing everything in their power to make switching away from their otherwise worthless service as painful as possible deserve to be stricken with boils and devoured slowly by abnormally large army ants.</rant>

So, out of half love for the people who work at my Church, whose contacts are caught up in the AOL fortress, and half for the rest of the people stuck with AOL’s clownware out there, I took it upon myself to write a python program that takes AOL’s address book and dumps it to a CSV file.

I dub you… ‘AOL is Worthless’ (or AIW for short)

For the geeks, here’s how it works: After you download the print format contact page, AIW splits it into sections for each person. It uses an SGML parser to run through the tags and identify the data. It runs through once and gets a list of all the different contact types for the title row of the CSV file. Then it goes back through again and collects each contact detail and writes it to the appropriate slot in the row and writes the row.

Like it says in the title, this is open source (GPL3). The zip file includes both a standalone EXE (unzip and read the readme) and the single python source file.

If this has been of use to you, all I ask is that you visit this page and read it all the way through: http://www.prairiebaptistchurch.org/Salvation.html

If you have problems, post in comments.

Download AOL is Worthless

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Geekiness-Hacker, Geekiness-NotSoMuch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.