For on-and-off two weeks now, I've been slowly trying to reorganize my place to minimize the "stuff overflow" factor - there is just too much "stuff" in my place. Too many non-personal things - books, dvds, furniture.

On Friday, I finally accomplished the first task of my room reorganization: minimize the visual overload from my DVD collection:

I saw a great Flickr photoset on using sleeves, but after cutting a few covers, it just didn't feel right - it was hard to get the size correct, and I didn't like the idea of destroying all my covers. So I just continued on without cutting the covers. (The plastic CD sleeves that were recommended in that photoset are really REALLY nice, especially given their price. They are cheap, and they are smooth enough for the sleeves to not stick together. Highly recommend.)

After a few days of transferring all my DVDs over to sleeves, I managed to get them all into a few boxes (alphabetized, obviously):

These fit nicely underneath my TV:

Of course, the shelf bowing concerns me; the DVDs may find a new home underneath my couch (which would help even more with the "hide stuff" motif).

The problem remained: how can I efficiently locate a DVD?

The answer: Delicious Library. I had no problem forking over $40 for the software after demoing it ... the beautiful thing was that it worked perfectly with my :CueCat USB bar code scanner! Without having to do any keyboard or mouse inputs! Every time I scanned a barcode on a DVD cover, Delicious Library would automatically pick it up, do the Amazon search, and add it to my library. BEAUTIFUL. (As a side note, given how cheap you can pick up a CueCat (I think I got mine for $8 on eBay), they work REALLY well; sometimes you gotta keep scanning back and forth for harder ones, but eventually it'll pick it up. *PLUS*, there's no extra software to install! Plug and play at its finest!)

Delicious Library let me digitally organize my collection. But this only solved half the problem: I also want to put up a copy of my library on the web. On the off chance I ever make friends, I can bribe them by offering them free rentals from Royflix; this lets them see what I have!

Luckily, Delicious Monster stores your collection in XML (in ~/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library/Library Media Data.xml). I hacked together a quick PHP script in about half an hour which parsed the XML and generated an HTML file (there were other libraries out there, but I have some ideas on how to expand this script later which required me to reinvent the wheel for now).

So, world ... here is my DVD collection!

And because Kristin Bell is so beautiful, a picture of her: