How?
This site is an original creation by me, Ben Dunham. It makes use of a few open source projects, a healthy dose of Ruby magic, a liberal smattering of Amazon REST API fun and a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. For the gritty details, read on!
Books
I used RedLaser, a fantastic iPhone application which enables you to batch scan all your books (and other barcoded items!) using the camera on the back of the iPhone. I'm still on the previous generation iPhone 3G so the camera is a bit shoddy, some of my books wouldn't scan at all, and others took several minutes of exasperated attempts under various light sources and and every possible angle. But the result is a nicely formatted list of barcodes which RedLaser helpfully email you as an email attachment.
I rustled up a quick bit of Ruby to loop over each of the items and download the book cover image from Amazon using their handy web service (via the most excellent ruby-aws gem).
You can download the ruby script here.
Music
I store all of my music in MP3 format on my Netgear Duo NAS drive. Some of these MP3 files have the album artwork embedded into the ID3 tags, others don't. A quick bit of Ruby performs a scan of all the files in my music directory, uses the ID3 tag (obtained using the mp3info ruby gem) to extract the Artist and Album name and image where available, and if no image is found resorts to the Amazon API to obtain the artwork via a simple search. It took roughly 10 minutes to extract the artwork from around 22GB of music (including Amazon lookups).
You can download the ruby script here.
Movies
Almost identical to the MP3 version, except it uses the mp4info ruby gem to extract the DVD cover from the MP4 files which make up my (entirely legal!) movie collection, also on the NAS.
You can download the ruby script here.
Home & Travel
No magic here, which might go some way toward explaining why there are so few pictures in this section! These are a hand curated selection of pics from my iPhoto library. I'm hoping to add some more shortly!
Tidying up...
Finally, all the images downloaded are of varying shapes and sizes. I ran a simple ImageMagick mogrify command to bring some order to the madness:
mogrify -format png -thumbnail 40x40^ -gravity center -extent 40x40 *
And there you have it, not so mysterious after all! At some point I would like to add extended data to all the tiles so you can hover to get the name of the Album, or DVD and a description of the personal photos etc... And setting up an automated system to keep the site updated with new additions to my libraries would also be an interesting challenge. Watch this space!