The Return of “Recently Read”

So I’ve been struggling of late to keep up the “Recently Read” thang in the sidebar. Because what’s the point of reading something if you can’t show it off to people.

I was previously using a plug-in called “AVH Amazon” to show stuff I’d recently read by building an Amazon wish list of same and then using that plug-in to display it.  Alas, Amazon recently changed their wish list API so that AVH Amazon (and a number of similar tools) don’t work. No idea why, unless it was to draw people toward using the official Amazon tools for same.

Yes, there are official Amazon widgets for wish lists (and others), but, honestly, they’re just damned fugly.  You’d think Amazon would be jumping at the chance toward flexibility and customizability of stuff that points people back to their site to buy items … but, sadly, no.

After a lot of trying out off various solutions, here’s what I’m currently using for the Recently Read items in the sidebar.

1. Goodreads.com is a community “book review and library” site.  Supposedly it has a million-zillion users, which sounds promising, though there’s no sign of a business model, which is somewhat less so.  However, the whole place looks pretty professional and usable, so if I can’t use Amazon to track this stuff, this seems like a reasonable alternative.
2. The WP Goodreads Bookshelf plug-in.  Though this thing is stamped “beta” all over the place, it seems to work like a champ in providing a highly customizable way of displaying items from a Goodread dataset.  (While Goodreads does have widgets, they are, for some bizarre reason, static — i.e., if you add a book to your “read” list, you have to recreate the sidebar listing. Yuck.)

So that’s what I currently have going in my sidebar.  The only awkwardness of it is that I imported my old “Recently” Amazon wishlist and, because the plug-in is set to look at the most recently entered, that means the most recently read stuff is not actually showing.  That will, in theory, change over time.