CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. The format is based on Keep a Changelog.

Version number 1.MINOR.PATCH, increments:

• MINOR version when relevant functionality was added, removed, changed
• PATCH version on bug fixes, small aesthetic changes, config changes

[Unreleased]

• see GitHub issues labeled "next release"

[v1.25.1] - 2023-01-29

Fixed

• greadbook() works with the new (and old) Goodreads book page, now
• some unit test code was broken

[v1.25] - 2022-09-22

After months, a necessary maintenance update without new features.

Fixed

• many tools were broken due to the new Goodreads OpenID login procedure (#38, #39), login (glogin()) should work now, unit tests are passing again
• "Warning: next input will be in plaintext" on password prompt on some systems without Term::ReadKey module. If important to you, run make deps.
• some unit test code was broken

Removed

• cron.monthly wasn't used for a long time so I don't want to maintain it any longer

[v1.24] - 2022-03-10

This release does not add any new features. However, some major internal renewals took place.

Note: This will break your existing Toolbox installation. Users have to run make deps and make installdirs after updating.

Changed

• Perl5 module dependencies are not installed system-wide anymore. Now these go into the project's local lib-directory. This helps non-Docker users to remove the toolbox with less residue. Also easens installation without root-privileges, given that Perl's local::lib module is installed.

• replaced outdated Perl5 module WWW::Curl::Easy with HTTP::Tiny. This should fix Curl-based installation problems on newer systems;

• recentrated.pl:

  • no longer saves to /var/db/good but to ./list-out/recentrated/
  • log-file written to ./list-out/recentrated/log.txt now

• Docker:

  • image is based on Alpine Linux now
  • webserver webfs was replaced with thttpd

[v1.23.3] - 2022-01-21

Fixed

• login didn't worked anymore due to HTML changes on a Goodreads webpage
• user_rating bug when extracting own(?) shelf; shelves of other users still work with the old code

Changed

• updated unit tests

Added

• new greadcomments() function in the Toolbox library to extract a user's comments on reviews, status updates etc.

[v1.23.1] - 2021-07-01

Changed

• migrated from DockerHub to GitHub Packages (ghcr.io); DockerHub no longer supports GitHub integration for free (for new accounts)
• a larger review text is indicated by at least 500 characters now (was 160 characters)

Added

• Makefile offers a Github Packages target
• clearer error message in a CAPTCHA situation

[v1.23] - 2020-10-31

This is primarily a maintenance update after a long time.

Fixed

• similaraut.pl:
  • failed to load authors because the source markup changed after the last version
• some improvements on the looks of all HTML reports

Added

• similarauth.pl:
  • new --minseen parameter to drop authors that are not similar to at least N other authors; reduces the number of authors and size of the output file

Changed

• recentrated.pl:
  • --textonly option also drops smaller texts now, because the flag's purpose is to cut down "noisy" e-mails with too many ratings and smaller reviews are almost always useless too ("loved it so much!"). Without this flag, [**** ], [TTTT ] and [tttt ] are shown as usual.
• lib/Goodscrapes.pl:
  • greadreviews() parameter text_only was renamed to text_minlen

[v1.22] - 2019-11-16

Fixed

• possible cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) against our HTML reports by adding Javascript to reviews, usernames, book titles on the Goodreads website. This software is too insignificant to be a real target, but you never know.

Added

• Dockerfile: Docker is a popular software that allows users to run apps in an isolated container with all dependencies included/matched; there are make-targets for Docker, now, see make help. The container runs a simple web-server so that a host can access any HTML report generated within the container. (#30)

Changed

• all programs write to the new list-out directory by default and not to the main directory any longer. This simplifies sharing files between a Docker container and its host (using Docker volumes or a httpd).
• the dict directory was renamed to list-in, dict/default.lst was renamed to list-in/dict.lst

[v1.21.1] - 2019-10-13

Fixed

• savreviews.pl:
  • "Undefined subroutine &Goodscrapes::max called at Goodscrapes.pm"

[v1.21.0] - 2019-10-10

Fixed

• "Use of uninitialized value $uid in concatenation (.) or string at Goodscrapes.pm" was caused by "NOT A BOOK" books, which actually have different book IDs but lack author info etc

Added

• all programs support the --ignore-errors option which disables retries and let a program keep going on despite of errors. This is useful when Goodreads has a bad day with permanent timeouts or other problems which often only affect a few resources while most of them can be obtained without problems. You also can re-run a program without this option, so that missing resources are loaded from the web again (and everything else from your local cache)

Removed

• developers: function gsetcache() was removed in favor of gsetopt( cache_days => int )

[v1.20.2] - 2019-08-31

Fixed

• friendnet.pl:
  • missing ");" at the end (syntax error)
• friendrated.pl:
  • poor table-caption in authors-report file

Added

• friendrated.pl:
  • new column 'GR Avg' with average rating by the Goodreads community
• git-hooks (developers): automatically check syntax of user-scripts and run library unit-tests before pushing changes to GitHub

Changed

• friendrated.pl:
  • output-filenames include stars-range and number of favorers
• covers and titles are not in the same column any more; each its own
• renamed "doc" folder to "help"

[v1.20.0] - 2019-08-26

Fixed

• login problems due to changed GR source markup
• year numbers < 1000 (including negative B.C.) were extracted as 0

Added

• new program: friendnet.pl - saves your social network to CSV files for further processing with social network analysis tools (#27)
• friendrated.pl:
  • new option --excludemy=read to exclude books which you've already read (#28)
  • new column 'Rank' in final books table (#29)
  • new column 'Author' in final books table
• table columns in HTML output are sortable in the web-browser, now

Changed

• moved all program documentation to the new doc-directory
• friendrated.pl:
  • renamed option --hate to --hated
  • books-table and authors-table are no longer in the same report file: each has its own file now
  • option --outfile changed to --outdir

Removed

• report.css was removed in favor of datatables.net libs (loaded from CDN)

[v1.19.2] - 2019-05-26

Fixed

• search.pl:
  • Titles were missing in the generated HTML file due to changes in the source markup

Added

• friendrated.pl:
  • --hate option to list most hated books among the members you follow (#24)
• recentrated.pl:
  • allows login and can be run against non-public member accounts

Changed

• friendrated.pl:
  • --rated option changed to --minrated
• recentrated.pl:
  • all option names and positional parameters changed (see --help)

[v1.18.0] - 2019-05-10

Fixed

• "Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex [...] line 1852" error broke programs on some Perl version

Added

• friendrated.pl:
  • new --toread option lists the most wished-for books among the members you follow (program checks the "to-read" shelves instead of the "read" shelves and sets --rated=0)
• recentrated.pl:
  • indicate active text-only option in mail body
  • indicate tweet-size text reviews by [tttt ] versus [TTTT ]

[v1.17.0] - 2019-03-24

Fixed

• similarauth.pl: showed 0 authors all the time because the source markup was changed by GR

Changed

• New CPAN dependencies, run Makefile or just run: $ sudo perl -MCPAN -e "install IO::Prompter"
• some programs no longer accept the Goodreads user-ID as first positional parameter but expect the user's login email address; you can still check another user with the --userid option:
  • likeminded.pl
  • friendrated.pl
  • friendgroup.pl
  • similarauth.pl

Added

• Users don't have to extract the Goodreads cookie from their web-browsers anymore. Programs which require a cookie can obtain it themselves now, given the user's login email address and password. This should render the toolbox more accessible to its users (#25)
• recentrated: --textonly option to skip ratings without text

[v1.16.0] - 2019-02-16

Fixed

• "Undefined subroutine &WWW::Curl::Easy::CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPALIVE" (#20)

Changed

• savreviews.pl:
  • writes multiple files at once, with one file per star-rating (#14)
  • reviews contain review date too
  • --outfile option changed to --outdir

Added

• friendrated.pl:
  • second table in document with most read authors
• savreviews.pl:
  • prints statistics with number of reviews per year

[v1.13.0] - 2019-01-18

Changed

• likeminded.pl:
  • --similar option was renamed to --common
  • final report does not rank members by the number of common authors only but includes library-sizes (#18)
  • final report does not list private accounts anymore
• generated HTML-reports now include report.css for styling

[v1.12.5] - 2019-01-13

Fixed

• "Experimental keys on scalar is now forbidden" if Perl 5.20+

Added

• likeminded.pl:
  • new option --maxauthorbooks to limit the amount of books per author since some authors list more than 2000 books; default is 600 most popular books
• friendrated.pl:
  • more filters, e.g., "books with less than 1000 ratings and published between 1950 to 1980 and ..." (#16)

Changed

• if Goodreads shows an "unexpected error", all programs retry multiple times but continue in any case; critical conditions such as "maintenance mode", "over capacity", connection issues etc are handled as usual (continuous retries or user CTRL-C)

[v1.11.0] - 2018-11-28

Fixed

• missing results in search.pl and other tools if num_ratings or num_reviews < 100 due to regex mistake, which existed for 3 months (since v1.9.0)

[v1.10.0] - 2018-09-27

Added

• new program: friendgroup.pl (#6)
• cookie validity is tested against Goodreads at the start of a program (using cookies)

[v1.9.1] - 2018-09-01

Changed

• one make target only for all Toolbox programs (simplifies maintenance and usage)

[v1.9.0] - 2018-08-24

Fixed

• wrong value in num_ratings or num_reviews if N>=1,000,000

[v1.8.0] - 2018-08-14

Added

• new program: savreviews.pl
• multiple --shelf options: --shelf=music --shelf=science (#10)
• --dict options for custom dictionaries
• added words-based dictionaries to ./dict/ folder (perform better than Ngram dicts)

Fixed

• search: exit condition bug

[v1.7.0] - 2018-07-29

Added

• new program: search.pl

[v1.6.0] - 2018-07-21

Added

• likeminded.pl:
  • dictionary-based reviews-search (builtin Ngrams dict) (#9)

[v1.5.0] - 2018-07-05

Added

• new program: similarauth.pl

[v1.4.0] - 2018-06-24

Removed

• XML/XSLT support dropped (YAGNI, less dependencies)

Changed

• likeminded.pl:
  • compares authors now, not books (see likeminded.md for details)
• all programs write to HTML files now, no XML/XSLT any longer

[v1.3.0] - 2018-06-22

Added

• new program: likeminded.pl

[v1.2.2] - 2018-05-18

Changed

• recentrated:
  • removed reviewer names from mail (noise)
  • indicates text reviews with [TTTT ] vs [**** ]
  • shorter URLs (mail clients recognize URLs without protocol too)

[v1.2.0] - 2018-05-10

Added

• new program: friendrated.pl

[v1.1.0] - 2018-01-09

Added

• new program: recentrated.pl

[v1.0.0] - 2014-11-05

Added

• new program: amz-tradein.pl