Reader integration: Autodata doesn't account for changing library locations

[utf9k]

Hey there,

I’ve been using the Readwise Reader integration for some time now to keep my backlog under control and it works quite nicely!

Lastly, I’ve also been reading books using Reader (instead of my Kobo) and as a slight hack, I’ve been marking books as “shortlists” so that they aren’t included in the read count that Beeminder fetches.

This works fine but as you may (or may not!) know, Reader allows you to customise your library workflow.

Currently, I use the Later/Shortlist/Archive workflow but I realised today that the Inbox/Later/Archive workflow is actually a bit more acccurate to how I’m using it.

Perhaps you can see where things are about to fall over.

According to the APi docs, locations are referenced by name rather than ID so as soon as I changed workflows and moved all of my books to the “Later” tab, they started being picked up by Beeminder instead of “Inbox” which is now fulfilling what “Later” was doing using the previous workflow.

I’ve switched my workflow back for now but it’d be nice to have a workaround in future.

I guess the fix here would be to let users have some way to influence which location the autodata integration is going to pull from, rather than trying to infer some magic based on the user’s library workflow at the time that they connected the integration?

Thanks!

[adamwolf]

You can email support and they can change the locations that are being counted. Some of our integrations have settings you can self-service, but many of them work where support has to adjust the settings after it’s been created.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “inferring some magic” or names vs IDs. When you create a goal, we show radio buttons with Inbox, Later, and Shortlist. We store the list of locations to count along with the goal.

[utf9k]

You can email support and they can change the locations that are being counted

Ah, thanks! I’ll send an email through then and ask if I can get that changed

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “inferring some magic” or names vs IDs. When you create a goal, we show radio buttons with Inbox, Later, and Shortlist. We store the list of locations to count along with the goal.

Woops, my bad I had a poke around the settings for my goal and had kind of assumed if there were any settings at the start of the autodata setup that they’d be surfaced. A lot of my day job is squashing software bugs so I jumped the gun there a bit as to what was going on under the hood haha.

Thanks for the reply!

[adamwolf]

Ah, makes sense. Autodata settings are a weird one. It’s often kinda tricky to change them without derailing or making changes you can’t really undo without support’s help anyway, so they often go to the bottom of the priority list.