samgrover.com

Books

Mar 10, 2020 Books

Inspired by Patrick Rhone’s /reading page, I’ve created a Books page on my site.

Following is the process I followed to make that happen on my Mac:

Export all my books out of Goodreads. You can find the page to do that by navigating to “My Books” and selecting “Import and export” at the bottom of the left sidebar under “Tools”. The exported file is of CSV format, which is pretty standard.
Open the export file in a spreadsheeting app. I use Numbers.app. Here, you can clean up any data. I added some ISBNs that were missing. I also saved this file so I can just update it in the future as I read books. Another reason I went through this step was because I was having a hard time parsing the original CSV file using the script I wrote.
Export the spreadsheet file as CSV.
Run it through the script below to generate Markdown that can be pasted directly into the page on my site.

And that’s it!

Here’s the script:

Mar 9, 2020

Flowers at sunset, after rain.

Some notes:

I constrained myself to photos taken on that day. No digging into the archives.
A lot of these were taken around the house or the neighborhood. I work from home and tend to go on walks at various times during the day.
Some days I took the photo but forgot to post and posted the next morning.
I don’t usually do photo challenges, daily or otherwise, so this was harder than I expected. Some days I kinda winged it, as can be seen 😜.

Mar 1, 2020

A vision of the coming Spring.