Hmmm, am I the only one that is noticing that Advogato has gotten really slow all of a sudden? Both from home and work it takes a good 30 seconds to bring up a page, oh well.

mwh:
Thanks for the hint, I didn't know that there was a performance difference. Guess I'll have to switch to has_key then. I've been thinking of getting trying out Python 2 one of these days, but just haven't gotten around to installing it. As for the try/except or has_key, that is the problem with languages today. Even the high level languages today need you to do special stuff to tweek out the last inch of performance. (Of course, if you're after performance why the hell are you using a high level language? :) )

AlanShutko:
I was thinking about printing out that information too, but after I read how many different fields and subfields there are, I decided I'd leave that to the end application. Really all I'd be doing would be writting a fancy name mapping program and I'd rather not do that. As for my MARC converter, I also have it being able to write out python MARC records that you read in. Just need to handle the data in the leader a bit more cleanly (like actually storing it) and it'll be somewhat useful. Now to update the books read page on my home page to use this instead of the crappy scripts I'm using now which fetch data from Borders.