Checkcards is set of scripts for querying the Naperville Public Library about the status of items checked out and on hold for all the members of a family. This blog post describes the motivation for the scripts and how they work.

If an item is due or overdue, its row will have a light red background. If an item is due within two days, its row will have a light yellow background.

To use the scripts, you'll have to make these changes:

• Create a file named checkcards_personal.py, and save it in the same folder as checkcards. Lines 10–20 of checkcards shows what the contents of checkcards_personal.py should look like. Five items must be defined:

  • mailFrom is the sender's email address

  • mailTo is the recipient's email address; it can be the same as the sender's

  • cardList is a list of Python dictionary entries, each of which consists of

    • patron: the cardholder's name, which can be a first name of a nickname—it isn't used to log in.
    • code: the barcode number on the front of the library card
    • pin: the cardholder's PIN

  • gmailUser: the sender's GMail user name

  • gmailPassword: the sender's GMail password

• In com.leancrew.checkcards.plist, the ProgramArguments entry needs the full path to checkcards, and the StartCalendarInterval entry should be set to whenever you want the program to run.

The com.leancrew.checkcards.plist file is needed if you plan to use OS X's launchd system to run checkcards at scheduled times. Put it in your ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder (which you may need to create) and run

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.leancrew.checkcards.plist

from the Terminal. You can check that it loaded correctly by running

launchctl list | grep leancrew

Lines 206–210 of checkcards log into GMail and send the HTML-formatted message via SMTP. If you don't have a GMail account, you'll have to change this section to work with your mail server.