Saying Goodbye to the Video Game Backlog section

I’ve decided to sunset the Video Game Backlog section of this blog in favor of an account on Backloggd! The benefits of this are that 1. it’s way easier to log something on Backloggd than to write a blogpost (which means booting up the laptop, taking screenshots, updating a CSV, checking stuff into git, etc. etc.). Secondly, I play a lot of games that I would like to log my thoughts on that aren’t tracked by my self-imposed “Steam backlog” format. What about games I play with my friends for our “book club”? What about games I acquire and then actually do play, most of which I really enjoy? Frankly, I don’t know why I didn’t just make a Backloggd account when I started blogging about video games in 2020. I guess I already had the blog and didn’t bother exploring my options. But I’m really enjoying Backloggd and I’m slowly moving posts from here over to there.

Saying Hello to da media zone

Part of moving to Backloggd for video game reviews is realizing that I could use my Backloggd profile’s RSS feed to embed that content into this blog! Once I got that working, it was trivial to do with my Letterboxd account, too (although I am not a huge movie watcher.) Alas, StoryGraph doesn’t have RSS feeds or even an API or anything, so books are out, which is a shame because I’ve been doing a lot of reading this year. I’ve combined the video game and film feeds with the songs of the week into da media zone to display and link to all that content in one place! An abridged version also displays in the right sidebar of the home page. I’ll probably be tweaking the CSS of these little review box widgets until the end of time.

Click Here to Aceess Da Media Zone

Integrating with Backloggd and Letterboxd

The obvious approach to displaying RSS feed content on this site would be to add some JavaScript to fetch the RSS feed, parse it, and then dynamically insert that content into the page. This works fine, but I want this page to remain as static as possible - if one of these sites disappears, I want the blog to still work and I want to keep a record of the content myself.

My first impulse was to create a GitLab CI/CD job to poll RSS feed links at regular intervals, check the changes in to git if applicable, and then automatically deploy the site. I won’t bother you with how this worked because it took me ages to get working and in the end I was just blocked by Backloggd’s anti-bot measures, at which point I gave up. I modified my script so that I could run it manually, and left it at that:

mkdir -p rss

echo "Fetching Backloggd RSS feed from ${BACKLOGGD_RSS_URL}"
curl   --location --output "${BACKLOGGD_RSS_FILE}" --url "${BACKLOGGD_RSS_URL}"
# debug what got downloaded
head "${BACKLOGGD_RSS_FILE}"

echo "Fetching Letterboxd RSS feed from ${LETTERBOXD_RSS_URL}"
curl   --location --output "${LETTERBOXD_RSS_FILE}" --url "${LETTERBOXD_RSS_URL}"
# debug what got downloaded
head "${LETTERBOXD_RSS_FILE}"

if [ git diff-index --quiet HEAD ]; then
    echo "RSS changes detected"

    git add rss/
    git commit -m "Updated rss feed cache"
    git push
else
    echo "No RSS changes detected"
fi

So when I make changes in Backloggd or Letterboxd, I still have to come to my computer and push a change, but at least its one step. Without automation though there is a 0% chance I will keep this up to date. Maybe I’ll come back and figure it out another time. At least I was able to optimize the deploy process along the way!