Sunday, May 6, 2012

Download Anki Decks from Web/Browser

If you have ever encountered a annoying and nondescript message from Anki when trying to download a deck, give this a try.  I came about it when I realized one of the offices I work in had blocked access to Anki's download repository.  There are other solutions involving firewalls and anti-virus blocks, but this just gets straight to the point:

1)  In your browser, go to http://anki.ichi2.net/file/search .

2)  It's all a big running text file, but you can search for certain phrases.  For example, I searched for "French" and scanned through the matches until I found a couple decks I wanted to try out.  Here is my example:

 [579, null, "HTAL French ", "A compilation of other decks as well as a few facts I've added myself. Deck is incomplete as of October 2009.", "French", 0, 3834, 475343, 976, 1256700637.820281, "6f3d2421c99cf1c28f7ea48685e92bcd.zip"]

See that "579" at the beginning?  That's the important number you want to keep track of -- just use the number associated with the deck that you found.

3)   Open up the web page http://anki.ichi2.net/file/get?id=579 but replace "579" in the address with the number associated with the deck you want to download.  You should be prompted to download a "Get.zip" file. (NOTE: This doesn't work very well in Google Chrome, but Internet Explorer won't give you any trouble.)

4)  Open the zip file.  "Shared.anki" is the only file you need to concern yourself with, so download it somewhere on your computer.

5)  Open Anki and click the "Import" button to select the "Shared.anki" file we just downloaded.  You're set!


NOTE:  Here is the error message I was receiving.  It's very likely that something is just blocking the access or DNS settings need to be tweaked.  I'm positive that my office has security settings in place that make it unreliable.


File "ankiqt\ui\getshared.pyc", line 64, in fetchData

File "urllib2.pyc", line 124, in urlopen
File "urllib2.pyc", line 383, in open
File "urllib2.pyc", line 401, in _open
File "urllib2.pyc", line 361, in _call_chain
File "urllib2.pyc", line 1130, in http_open
File "urllib2.pyc", line 1105, in do_open
URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it>






1 comment:

  1. I'm having problems when trying to send all the information I've stored within anki at my office to the web respository. The exhibited message is similar to that you've posted (actually, that was the reason why I came to your blog, I simply posted "Errno 10061" anki on google search and here I am). Can you help me? I hope I made myself understood, English is not my native language...

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