A script for backing up your Goodreads reviews
Last year, I started using Goodreads to track my reading. (I’m alexwlchan if you want to follow me.) In the past, I’ve had a couple of hand-rolled systems for recording my books, but maintaining them often became a distraction from actually reading!
Using Goodreads is quite a bit simpler, but it means my book data is stored on somebody else’s servers. What if Goodreads goes away? I don’t want to lose that data, particularly because I’m trying to be better about writing some notes after I finish a book.
There is an export function on Goodreads, but it has to be invoked by hand. I prefer to have backup tools that can be run automatically: I can set them to run on a schedule, and I know my data is safe. This tends to be a script or a cron job.
That’s exactly what I’ve done for Goodreads: I’ve written a Python script that uses the Goodreads API to grab the same information as provided by the builtin export. I have this configured to run once a day, and now I have daily backups of my Goodreads data. You can find the script and installation instructions on GitHub.
This was a fun opportunity to play with the ElementTree module (normally I work with JSON), and also a reminder that the lack of yield from has become my most disliked feature in Python 2.