Hi everyone! I’m trying to automate all or most of my Beeminder goals as I’m not very good with numbers.
I’ve been having issues with Goodreads and IFTTT. I want to count books read, not pages read. Looking at older threads here, I tried the status update “started reading” RSS (in my case finished reading), but that didn’t submit to Beeminder. (Now Goodreads just says “added” a book instead of finished/started.)
So I tried putting the RSS feed of my “read” shelf. It looks like this: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/5228124?key=yThJZxjUdoNpPHIb8_viVDk4jHhOInIQV96RbIcR6ufk6P7N&shelf=read
I can’t get that to work either. I put it in IFTTT’s authentication link, and it came out invalid. (Too much information?) I don’t know enough code to fix it so the only info Beeminder gets is “added to Read shelf.” Maybe it’s user error on my end? Can anyone help? Thanks! I love Beeminder so far!
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+1 for an official Goodreads integration 
@dreeves
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Yes please an official integration @dreev! I was frustrated and confused when what other people set up didn’t work. I think I was trying to beemind stuff I don’t really have to beemind right now, as a beginner. I’ll just stick with Goodreads itself for now.
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@heatherjmitchell one thing you can setup easily on Goodreads is a yearly challenge. You commit to a certain number of books per calendar year. It will show you how many books ahead or behind you are.
(However, there is no sting, and you can change your books/year at at any time.)
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I’ve done yearly challenges on Goodreads before. Thanks for the suggestion though!
I guess I’m more like the people who want to track certain books, not all the books they read. I’ll change it to Time Read per day, and see how that works.
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That’s weird. I have the RSS to Beeminder in IFTTT working fine.
You’d need to select RSS channel as ‘this’, select new feed item trigger, put in the URL, select Beeminder as ‘that’ and setup action of adding a datapoint.
What do you mean by IFTTT authentication link? Is authentication to Beeminder not working as it’s supposed to?
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I’m back. I got the Read shelf RSS to work, so I thought I’d make a shelf called “review” and add books to that. So I did, but now I can’t get that new RSS feed to work in IFTTT. The feed is now: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/5228124?key=yThJZxjUdoNpPHIb8_viVDk4jHhOInIQV96RbIcR6ufk6P7N&shelf=review
IFTTT’s help section says:
“RSS feeds used in the Feed Channel have a few requirements: a top-level feed title and a unique link, a GUID and date for each entry, valid RSS or Atom syntax.” They link to http://validator.w3.org/feed/. I pasted in the feed URL, and it came out “This is not valid.”
Maybe I’m not giving enough data? If I only add two books a month instead of 1 a week, would that make the IFTTT recipe not trigger? Refreshing the Beeminder graph makes it fetch data, right?
First, I tried removing the book I added to the “review” shelf before I set it up with Beeminder. Then I set up IFTTT with Beeminder, and added the book back to have Beeminder fetch it. For the other feed, I added a “test” book to the feed to see if that fixed it, which it did. I’m going to do that again, even though my data would be off by a little bit. I’ll try adding the new book I started and want to review on my blog, and see if that works.
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Hi @heatherjmitchell,
I think what you’re doing should work. I am not privy to the inner workings of IFTTT, but I have noticed that with infrequent triggers, sometimes it takes a while to process–maybe even a few hours.
This is with non-Beeminder stuff, but it’s another complication making it tricky to debug. I think it sounds like you’re going to do it, but I would do the following to test it:
- Set up the IFTTT trigger.
- Wait an hour or two
- Add the book to the review stack.
- Wait an hour or two to see if it triggers.
(I’m glad some parts worked out for you though!)
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Hi @adamwolf,
I did what you recommened and got it to work! Thanks for your help!
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