A few days ago I posted about updates to my little FreshRSS script. I already did some fairly quick simple updates, though some didn’t quite work out as hoped initially.
Firstly, I didn’t care for the big blob daily article file it pushed out to the archive. So now it spits out a bunch of individual articles, formatted “YYYY-MM-DD-Article Title.md.” this created my first issue. I got a “Filename too long error.” So I set up a check to truncate the article title to 100 characters, if its longer than 100 characters. I can’t just always slice it, because if its short, I will get an “index out of range” error. I then ran into a second issue. One of the articles I tagged was about the new Ranma 1/2 series. The system, totally choked on the / in 1/2.
I tried a few things to replace any /?%$&#@ symbols, because they all felt like potential catches. Working with slashes is a pain though since its “the escape character”. I ended up just untagging the article so the problem would go away for now.
The second change I made was to add a conditional for if the feed has a “Yes” under “Publish”. This allows me to add more feeds that simply, write articles, without posting links anywhere.
After running it, I noticed something though. None of the new non posting Notes or Recipes were making files. It seems they were all older than the “last run” time. Since I only needed them to work once, I just, force the feed to look at the last 1000+ hours.
This created another error with the WordPress module. These files only feeds don’t have URLs or usernames etc, so when the wp module called for this information, it just craps out. I moved the call to create the connection to inside the “should I post” conditional, which fixed the issue.
Another, thing I tried to do, though this is less coding and more convenience. the script runs in a virtual environment right now. Which is “good practice” but annoying to use. I’ve been trying to work out how to run it without all the hassle, though so far nothing I have found is real definitive. I have tried running the “version of python in the virtual environment, ie “venv/bin/python3 main.py”, but that doesn’t seem to work. I saw a suggestion fo using a hashang in the top line, which I tried, but that didn’t work. So I am just, back to “cd Scripts/Python/FreshRSS-Poster/” then “source venv/bin/activate” then “python3 main.py”, which is annoying, but it works.
There are still a few things I want to work out.
When I save files in other methods, it embeds images in them. I would like to adjust the formatting to mimic that.
The dates on the files are all the date run, though they should not be. I need to look into that.
I should sort the file outputs into directories based on the blog or topic tag.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Today, I want to talk about recent improvements I have made on my FreshRSS to WordPress Digest Python script. And to make a note on what I would like to do next.
The first version was simple, it pulled from the sharded feed of FreshRSS, collected favorited articles, formatted them a bit, then posted a wordpress post of links.
Overtime, I wanted these posts to be prettier, so I added a bit more massaging to the formatting, and some HTML code so the links would show up in pretty little formatted boxes. I also decided some sort of summary would be useful, so it pulls the first 100 words or so from a feed item as a teaser.
Initially I was using the main share feed from FreshRSS, but I have two blogs, each with vague but disting “themes”. Sharing video game news to [BI] felt a bit silly. Not that it matters, no one reads those lists and its mostly for my reference. I found you could narrow things down by personal tags, so altered the Python script to handle any number of configured blogs and now both get seperate link lists.
So, whats new this round?
Not a lot on the externally visible end. A week or so ago, I found that the Raspberry Pi I had running the script on had died on me. Or, more likely, the SD card did. Whatever the case, the script was not running as scheduled. I have always had a bit of a love/hate with the scheduled run. Some days I barely share anything from the reader, so it makes for weird small posts. Also it ran at like, 10:30P, which was kind of late, and occasionally, I found myself rushing to get through everything to make sure I flagged anything relevant, because I was flipping through it at 5 minutes till.
Right now, I am running it manually. And at irregular intervals. This created a new problem, but its one I had already been planning to fix. The way the FreshRSS shared feed works, you can append a number, X, and get “everything in the last X hours.” When it ran on a cronjob schedule every 24 hours, this number was simply, hardcoded at 24.
When manually running things, I needed X to be “however many hours since it last ran.” So now, it writes out a simple file with a time stamp, after each run. It also pulls in that file, and calculated the time difference. If the time difference is less than an hour, it defaults to an hour, because “X=0”, just gives the default feed, which may be everything, or may be the last ten items. I am not sure on the limits. If there isn’t a timestamp file, most likely if its being first run, it sets the hours different to 0, and gets everything.
Something else I added this round, everytime I wanted to do modifications, I needed to comment out some lines and uncomment others, so the script would not spam my blog with the same post over and over. Also, I have a time stamp file now that I don’t want to overwrite when testing, since it will probably stop seeing feed items unless they were marked in the last hour.
So I added a flag variable at the top, and encapsulated the business end output in some conditional statements. Now, when I want to test, I just change the “runmode” variable at the tol to “False”, and it stops posting or editing the time stamp file.
This was also needed for my third new feature. In addition to posting to the blog, it spits everything out into a simple, dated markdown file. This way, I have a private record of everything shared, since a lot of the point is, “I want to keep these links for reference.” Initially I just spit out the post data, but that was ugly since it was full of HTML tags. So It now compiles together a second, markdown formatted, variable, that gets written to the file. Another key difference, in my private files, I dump the entire article, and not just the 100 word summary.
I don’t want to repost entire articles on my blog, its rude and ugly, hence the summary, but for a private archive of text data, dumping it all is preferable. Articles disappear ALL the time, this is literally 100% of why I save and archive shit like this in the first place.
Some changes I still want to make
Right now it dumps everything into one output file, I may split this across blogs/topics
Another advantage of the private archive, I can add any number of additional tags to pull, that don’t have to be posted anywhere. I can just, pull them to a text archive. I already have started a recipes tag, for example. I also added a to be used flag in the config for it a feed gets posted anywhere.
I am kind of down on the idea of AI, but I still may look into hooking the summary function to some sort of AI service to create actual summaries. In my very very vague testing, it had a hard time keeping it short, even when instructed to do so.
I kind of want to modify the script to also produce a queue of links, then maybe a second script on a schedule that posts any links out of a file on microblogging services like Mastodon.
I would love to find a way to share links I find elsewhere to FreshRSS or this script.
I kind of want to find a way to sort and group posts under categories (Music, Coding, Video Games, etc). I have ideas oh how, but they are not all very… Elegant.
I kind of dislike having the timestamp file, I would like to figure out a way to query the WordPress Blog itself for “The last post marked link list,” and go off of that as the “last run date.”
The “Holy Grail” want, is the ability to add comments to shares. I put in a suggestion on the Github page for a “Notes” feature. I am seriously just considering making my own plug in. This would be super useful for WHY I shared a link. I could use this later in the social sharing queue system as well. The idea would be, as an example, I tag a post for a new CHVRCHES album, then add a little note, “I am super looking forward to this!”, then on the digest, the comment would show up.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I have been wanting to convert my Twitter Export archive into a more useful format for a while. I had vague dreams of maybe turning them into some sort of digest posts on WordPress but there are a fuckton of tweets (25,000) and it would require a LOT of scrubbing. I could probably manage to find and remove Retweets pretty easily, but then there is the issue of media and getting the images into the digest posts and it’s just not worth the hassle.
What I can, and did do, is preserve the data is a better, more digestible, and searchable format. Specifically, Markdown. Well, ok, the files are not doing anything fancy, so it’s just, plaintext, pretending to be Markdown.
I have no idea if Twitter still offers an export dump of your data, I have not visited the site at all in over a year. I left, I deleted everything, I blocked it on my DNS. But assuming they do, or you have one, it’s a big zip file that can be unrolled I to a sort of, local, Twitter-like interface. There are a lot of files in this ball, and while I am keeping the core archive, I just mostly care about the content.
If you dig in, it’s easy to find, there is a folder called data, the tweets are in a file called “tweets.js.”. It’s some sort of JSON/XML style format. If you want to media, it’s in a folder called “Tweets_Media” or something like that. I skimmed through mine, most of the images looked familiar, because I already have them, I removed the copy because I didn’t need it.
But I kept the Tweets.js file.
So, what to do with it? It has a bunch of extraneous meta data for each Tweet that makes it a cluttered mess. It’s useful for a huge website, but all I want is the date and the text. Here is a sample Tweet in the file.
So I wrote a quick and simple Python Script (it’s below). I probably could have done something fancy with Beautiful Soup or Pandas, but instead I did a quick and basic scan that pulls the data I care about. If a line contains “created_at” pull it out to get the data, if it has “full_text”, pull it out to get the text.
Once I was able to output these two lines, I went about cleaning them up a bit. I don’t need the titles, so I started by splitting on “:”. This was quickly problematic if the Tweet contained a semicolon and because the time contained several semicolons. Instead I did a split on ‘ ” : ” ‘. Specifically, quote, space, semicolon, space, quote.”. Only the breaks I wanted had the spaces and quotes, so that got me through step one. The end quotation mark was easy to slice off as well.
I considered simplifying things by using the same transformation on the date and the text, but the data also had this +0000 in it that I wanted to remove. It’s not efficient, but it was just as simple to just have two, very similar operations.
After some massaging, I was able to output something along the lines of “date – text”.
But then I noticed that for some reason the Tweets are apparently not in date order. I had decided that I was just going to create a series of year based archival files, so I needed them to be in order.
So I added a few more steps to sort each Tweet during processing into an array of arrays based on the year. Once again, this isn’t the cleanest code, It assumes a range of something like, 2004 to 2026, which covers my needs for certain. I also had some “index out of range” errors with my array of arrays, which probably have a clever loopy solution, but instead it’s just a bug pre-initialized copy/paste array.
Part of the motivation of doing the array of arrays was also that I could make the script output my sorted yearly files directly, but I just did it manually from the big ball final result.. the job is done, but it could easily be done by adjusting the lower output block a bit.
Anyway, here is the code, and a link to a Git repository for it.
# A simple script that takes an exported tweets.js file and outputs it to a markdown text file for archiving.
# In pulling data for this, I noticed that older Twitter exports use a csv file instead of a .js file.
# As such, this is for newer exports.
# The Tweets.js file is in the 'data' directory of a standard Twitter archive export file.
# Open the tweet.js file containing all the tweets, should eb in the same folder
with open("tweets.js", encoding="utf-8") as file:
filedata = file.readlines()
tweet_data = []
current_tweet = []
# The Tweets don't seem to be in order, so I needed to sort them out, this is admitedly ugly
# but I only need to cover so many years of sorting and this was the easiest way to avoid index errors
sorted_tweets = [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]
# Does a simple search through the file. It pulls out the date posted and the full text.
# This does not do anything with images, sorry, that gets more complicated, it would be doable
for line in filedata:
if "created_at" in line:
timesplit = line.split(":")
posted_at = line.split("\" : \"")[1].replace(" +0000 ", " ")[:-3]
current_tweet.append(posted_at)
elif "full_text" in line:
current_tweet.append(line.split("\" : \"")[1][:-3])
# current_tweet.append(line.split(":")[1].split("\"")[1])
tweet_data.append(current_tweet)
current_tweet = []
# Because full text is always after the date, it just moves on after it gets both
else:
pass
# An ugly sort, it simply looks for the year in the date, then creates an array of arrays based on year.
# I did it this way partly in case I wanted to output to seperate files based on year, but I can copy/paste that
# It probably is still out of order based on date, but whatever, I just want a simple archive file
for each in tweet_data:
for year in range(2004, 2026):
if str(year) in each[0]:
sorted_tweets[year - 2004].append(each)
# Prints the output and dumps it to a file.
with open("output.md", encoding="utf-8", mode="w") as output:
for eachyear in sorted_tweets:
for each in reversed(eachyear):
output.write(each[0] + " : " + each[1] + "\n")
print(each[0] + " : " + each[1])
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I have a huge pile of online courses bookmarked that I would like to run through. This does have some pitfalls, maybe I’ll get to that another day. Today I want to discuss one I finished. The FreeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design course. You get a little certification for completing these, which mostly just bolsters the part of me that, doesn’t really find much value in certifications. I didn’t really need to take this course, but it’s part of the basic “core list” on FreeCodeCamp’s website, and my obsessive completionism mind says I should do those, in addition to anything else I might find on the site. I am not a web design expert (maybe, something something Imposter Syndrome), I don’t really need to take this course. Of all of the coding I have done, web design is what I’ve done the most. I figure this would be a breeze.
Boy was it not.
And not because it was hard.
I have been doing some other courses on this website, and there is a lot of variety in teaching styles, so this is less a criticism of FCC and more a criticism of this course. I also will add that if you were a complete beginner, it probably would be, less tedious. It touches a bit on the “maybe I’ll get to that another day” back at the top of this post, in that soooo much online learning is sooooo beginner oriented it’s a bit of a trap.
But anyway, the Responsive Web Design course. I’ll run through some of the stuff built in a bit, but I want to address some issues I had with the course, not even the content, just the structure. It’s probably just a limitation of the automated system more than anything else.
It’s incredibly hand holdey.
To the point of being a bit tedious, and possibly to some extent being bad for actually learning. One of the praises I have had for that Angela Yu Python course was how well it ramped up its projects. It presented an idea, it hand held you through a project, it guided you through a second project using that concept, then it would tell you to free-form a related project. Repeat, for each new concept. Where I felt that this FCC course missed is the part where eventually it lets you do more on your own. One easy example, early on, it covers the basic structure of an HTML page and things to put in the header, like the link to the style sheet or metadata. And then, every lesson after, it just, keeps repeating the same 3 or 4 steps to add these items.
Ideally, at some point, it would just be a step to “Add the standard boilerplate HTML and header”. With no prompts on what goes in there, so that you have to do it entirely on your own.
This sort of thing shows up a lot in later lessons too. It will do things you have done several times before, in this clunky step-by-step fashion. “Add a width of XXX to this class”, “Now set the background color to #XXXXXX”, now set the positioning. At some point, it really feels like it would be beneficial to just say, “Set up this div block with these parameters, so you are forced to do it on your own completely. instead of one step at a time, explicitly spelled out each time.
You can skip anything that isn’t part of the actual 5 main tests. Which is totally doable, because another issue I found was that the previous teaching, rarely had anything to do with the “free-form test” part. For the first one you build a survey form, and that one matched pretty well. The Tribute Page was close-ish, but starting to stray. The following two sections end with a Product Landing Page and a Technical Documentation Page. Which are basically just, slight variations of the Tribute Page. As is the final project of a Personal Portfolio page. The exercises though are these slightly painfully slow little CSS-based art projects. You kind of learn some neat techniques, but honestly, as someone who has done some front-end dev work, a lot of it is simply not practical. The CSS penguin is neat, but if I want a penguin on my webpage, I’m just going to find a PNG.
The final challenges themselves are kind of simple to cheese through as well. There is a checklist of what it’s looking for, if you meet those requirements, you pass. It doesn’t matter if the end result is even functional. For the Profile page, I took the code from my existing Github.io page and added some ID tags to it.
There is also this weird inconsistency of methodology. It’s most obvious in colors. There are several ways to assign colors in CSS. Which one is used in this course is inconsistent, though it seems to prefer RGB (R G B). Personally, I prefer just using hex, it’s simple and easy Just an easy #aaaaaa, that sort of thing. There is a lot in this course that actually kind of feels like there is an instructor trying to push some supremely anal-retentive and less-used CSS concepts on the world. using rgb instead of hex doesn’t make you a graphic designer even though it feels fancier. Also, classes are much preferred to ids. There are a lot of places using ids in this course where it should use classes.
Anyway, the projects themselves. I’ve posted the whole thing on GitHub, and I’ll point out my personal highlights.
CSS Colored markers – As tedious as the course was in its teaching methods, the little artsy CSS things do turn out neat like these little markers. This was probably the most interesting from the first section.
Flexbox Photo Gallery – I actually reused this code to build a new version of my home dashboard to replace the one I lost when my Raspberry Pi crapped out. This is probably the most valuable lesson in this whole lesson set.
CHVRCHES Tribute Page – Not that exciting of a design, but the final project was to build a tribute page, so I made one for CHVRCHES.
Balance Sheet – It’s nice looking, but there are jQuery libraries that basically just do this, with tables.
Picasso Painting – I have no idea WTF this is supposed to be. Apparently, others don’t either because I noticed that at some point this lesson was replaced with one where you build a cat painting.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I already have my Letterboxed watches set up to syndicate here, to this blog, for archival purposes mostly. When I log a movie in Letterboxed, a plug-in catches it from the RSS feed and makes a post. This is done using a plug-in called “RSS Importer” They aren’t the prettiest posts, I may look into adjusting the formatting with some CSS, but they are there. I really want to do the same for my Goodreads reading. Goodreads lists all have an RSS feed, so reason would have it that I could simply, put that feed into RSS Importer and have the same syndication happen.
For some reason, it throws out an error.
The feed shows as valid and even gives me a preview post, but for whatever reason, it won’t create the actual posts. This is probably actually ok, since the Goodreads RSS feed is weird and ugly. I’ll get more into that in a bit.
The Feed URL Is Here, at the bottom of each list.
I decided that I could simply, do it myself, with Python. One thing Python is excellent for is data retrieval and manipulation. I’m already doing something similar with my FreshRSS Syndication posts. I wanted to run through a bit of the process flow here though I used for creating this script. Partially because it might help people who are trying to learn programming and understand a bit more about how creating a program, at least a simple one, actually sort of works.
There were some basic maintenance tasks needing to be done. Firstly, I made sure I had a category on my WordPress site to accept the posts into. I had this already because I needed it trying to get RSS Importer to work. Secondly, I created a new project in PyCharm. Visual Studio Code works as well, any number of IDEs work, I just prefer PyCharm for Python. In my main.py file, I also added some commented-out bit at the header with URLs cut and pasted from Goodreads. I also verified these feeds actually worked with an RSS Reader.
For the actual code there are basically three steps to this process needed:
Retrieve the RSS feed
Process the RSS Feed
Post the processed data.
Part three here, is essentially already done. I can easily lift the code from my FreshRSS poster, replace the actual post data payload, and let it go. I can’t process data at all without data to process, so step one is to get the RSS data. I could probably work it out also from my FreshRSS script, but instead, I decided to just refresh my memory by searching for “Python Get RSS Feed”. Which brings up one of the two core points I want to make here in this post.
Programming is not about knowing all the code.
Programming is more often about knowing what process needs to be done, and knowing where and how to use the code needed. I don’t remember the exact libraries and syntax to get an RSS feed and feed it through Beautiful Soup. I know that I need to get an RSS feed, and I know I need Beautiful Soup.
My search returned this link, which I cribbed some code from, modifying the variables as needed. I basically skimmed through to just before “Outputting to a file”. I don’t need to output to a file, I can just do some print statements during debugging and then later it will all output to WordPress through a constructed string.
I did several runs along the way, finding that I needed to use lxml instead of xml in the features on the Beautiful Soup Call. I also opted to put the feed URL in a variable instead of directly in the code as the original post had it. It’s easy to swap out. I also did some testing by simply printing the output of “books” to make sure I was actually getting useful data, which I was.
At this point, my code looks something like this (not exactly but something like it:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
feedurl = "Goodreads URL HERE"
def goodreads_rss(feedurl):
article_list = [] try:
r = requests.get(feedurl)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, features='lxml')
books = soup.findAll('item')
for a in books:
title = a.find('title').text
link = a.find('link').text
published = a.find('pubDate').text
book = {
'title': title,
'link': link,
'published': published
}
book_list.append(book)
return print(book_list)
print('Starting scraping')
goodreads_rss()
print('Finished scraping')
I was getting good data, and so Step 1 (above) was done. The real meat here is processing the data. I mentioned before, Goodreads gives a really ugly RSS feed. It has several tags for data in it, but they aren’t actually used for some reason. Here is a single sample of what a single book looks like:
<item>
<guid></guid>
<pubdate></pubdate>
<title></title>
<link/>
<book_id>5907</book_id>
<book_image_url></book_image_url>
<book_small_image_url></book_small_image_url>
<book_medium_image_url></book_medium_image_url>
<book_large_image_url></book_large_image_url>
<book_description>Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001).]]></book_description>
<book id="5907">
<num_pages>366</num_pages>
</book>
<author_name>J.R.R. Tolkien</author_name>
<isbn></isbn>
<user_name>Josh</user_name>
<user_rating>4</user_rating>
<user_read_at></user_read_at>
<user_date_added></user_date_added>
<user_date_created></user_date_created>
<user_shelves>2008-reads</user_shelves>
<user_review></user_review>
<average_rating>4.28</average_rating>
<book_published>1937</book_published>
<description>
<img alt="The Hobbit (The Lord of the Rings, #0)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546071216l/5907._SY75_.jpg"/><br/>
author: J.R.R. Tolkien<br/>
name: Josh<br/>
average rating: 4.28<br/>
book published: 1937<br/>
rating: 4<br/>
read at: <br/>
date added: 2011/02/22<br/>
shelves: 2008-reads<br/>
review: <br/><br/>
]]>
</description>
</item>
Half the data isn’t within the useful tags, instead, it’s just down below the image tag inside the Description. Not all of it though. It’s ugly and weird. The other thing that REALLY sticks out here, if you skim through it, there is NO “title” attribute. The boot title isn’t (quite) even in the feed. Instead, it just has a Book ID, which is a number that, presumably, relates to something on Goodreads.
In the above code, there is a line “for a in books”, which starts a loop and builds an array of book objects. This is where all the data I’ll need later will go, for each book. in a format similar to what is show “title = a.find(‘title’).text”. First I pulled out the easy ones that I might want when later constructing the actual post.
num_pages
book_description
author_name
user_rating
isbn (Not every book has one, but some do)
book_published
img
Lastly, I also pulled out the “description” and set to work parsing it out. It’s just a big string, and it’s regularly formatted across all books, so I split it on the br tags. This gave me a list with each line as an entry in the list. I counted out the index for each list element and then split them again on “: “, assigning the value at index [1] (the second value) to various variables.
The end result is an array of book objects with usable data that I can later build into a string that will be delivered to WordPress as a post. The code at this point looks like this:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "GOODREADS URL"
book_list = []
def goodreads_rss(feed_url):
try:
r = requests.get(feed_url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, features='lxml')
books = soup.findAll('item')
for a in books:
print(a)
book_blob = a.find('description').text.split('<br/>')
book_data = book_blob[0].split('\n ')
author = a.find('author_name').text
isbn = a.find('isbn').text
desc = a.find('book_description').text
image = str(a.find('img'))
title = str(image).split('"')[1]
article = {
'author': author,
'isbn': isbn,
'desc': desc,
'title': title,
'image': image,
'published': book_data[4].split(": ")[1],
'my_rating': book_data[5].split(": ")[1],
'date_read': book_data[7].split(": ")[1],
'my_review': book_data[9].split(": ")[1],
# Uncomment for debugging
#'payload': book_data,
}
book_list.append(article)
return book_list
except Exception as e:
print('The scraping job failed. See exception: ')
print(e)
print('Starting scraping')
for_feed = goodreads_rss(url)
for each in for_feed:
print(each)
And a sample of the output looks something like this (3 books):
{'author': 'George Orwell', 'isbn': '', 'desc': ' When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]>', 'title': 'Animal Farm', 'image': '<img alt="Animal Farm" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1424037542l/7613._SY75_.jpg"/>', 'published': '1945', 'my_rating': '4', 'date_read': '2011/02/22', 'my_review': ''}
{'author': 'Philip Pullman', 'isbn': '0679879242', 'desc': "Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want--but what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.]]>", 'title': 'The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)', 'image': '<img alt="The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX50_.jpg"/>', 'published': '1995', 'my_rating': '4', 'date_read': '2011/02/22', 'my_review': ''}
{'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', 'isbn': '', 'desc': 'Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001).]]>', 'title': 'The Hobbit (The Lord of the Rings, #0)', 'image': '<img alt="The Hobbit (The Lord of the Rings, #0)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546071216l/5907._SY75_.jpg"/>', 'published': '1937', 'my_rating': '4', 'date_read': '2011/02/22', 'my_review': ''}
I still would like to get the Title, which isn’t an entry, but, each Image, uses the Book Title as its alt text. I can use the previously pulled-out “image” string to get this. The image result is a complete HTML Image tag and link. It’s regularly structured, so I can split it, then take the second entry (the title) and assign it to a variable. I should not have to worry about titles with quotes being an issue, since the way Goodreads is sending the payload, these quotes should already be removed or dealt with in some way, or the image tag itself wouldn’t work.
title = str(image).split('"')[1]
I’m not going to go super deep into the formatting process, for conciseness, but it’s not really that hard and the code will appear in my final code chunk. Basically, I want the entries to look like little cards, with a thumbnail image, and most of the data pulled into my array formatted out. I’ll mock up something using basic HTML code independently, then use that code to build the structure of my post string. It will look something like this when finished, with the variables stuck in place in the relevant points, so the code will loop through, and insert all the values:
I don’t use all of the classes added, but I did add custom classes to everything, I don’t want to have to go back and modify my code later if I want to add more formatting. I did make a bit of simple CSS that can be added to the WordPress custom CSS (or any CSS actually, if you just wanted to stick this in a webpage) to make some simple cards. They should center in whatever container they get stuck inside, in my case, it’s the WordPress column.
The end result looks something like this. Unfortunately, the images in the feed are tiny, but that’s ok, it doesn’t need to be huge.
Something I noticed along the way, I had initially been using the “all books” RSS feed, which meant it was giving all books on my profile, not JUST read books. I switched the RSS feed to “read” and things still worked, but “read” only returns a maximum of 200 books. Fortunately, I use shelves based on year for my books, so I can go through each shelf and pull out ALL the books I have read over the years.
Which leads me to a bit of a split in the process.
At some point, I’ll want to run this code, on a schedule somewhere, and have it check for newly read books (probably based on date), and post those as they are read.
But I also want to pull and post ALL the old reads, by date. These two paths will MOSTLY use the same code. For the new books, I’ll attach it to the “read” list, have it check the feed, then compare the date added in the latest entry, entry [0], to the current date. If it’s new, say, within 24 hours, it’ll post the book as a new post.
Change of plans. Rather than make individual posts, I’m going to just generate a pile of HTML code, and make backdated posts for each previous year. Much simpler and cleaner. I can then run the code once a year and make a new post on December 31st. Goodreads already serves the basic purpose of “book tracking”, I mostly just want an archive version. It’s also cleaner looking in the blog and means I don’t need to run the script all the time or have it even make the posts itself.
For the archive, I’ll pull all entries for each of my yearly shelves, then make a post for all of them, replacing the “published date” on each with the “date added” date. Because I want the entries on my Blog to match the (approximate) finished date.
I think, we’ll see.
I’ve decided to just strike out these changes of plans. After making the post, I noticed the date added, is not the date read. I know the yearly shelves are accurate, but the date added is when I added it, probably from some other notes at a later date. Unfortunately, the RSS feed doesn’t have any sort of entry for “Date Read” even though it’s a field you can set as a user, so I just removed it. It’s probably for the best, Goodreads only allows one “Date Read,” so any books I’ve read twice, will not be accurate anyway.
This whole new plan of yearly digests also means in the end I can skip step 3 above. I’m not making the script make the posts, I can cut and paste and make them manually. This lets me double-check things. One little bit I found, there was an artifact in the description of some brackets. I just added a string slice to chop it off.
I guess it’s a good idea to at some point mention the second of the two points I wanted to make here, about reusing code. Programming is all about reusing code. Your own code, someone else’s code, it doesn’t matter, code is code. There are only so many ways to do the same thing in code, they are all going to look generically the same. I picked out bits from that linked article and made them work for what I was doing, I’ll pick bits from my FreshRSS poster code, and clean it up as needed to work here. I’ll reuse 90% of the code here, to make two nearly identical scripts, one to run on a schedule, and one to be run several times manually. This also feeds back into point one, knowing what code you need and how to use it. Find the code you need, massage it together into one new block of code, and debug out the kinks. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
