I have a TRMNL on my desk. If you haven't seen one, it's a little e-ink display from trmnl.com that shows you whatever you tell it to: your calendar, the weather (but in Haiku form), a far side comic, a random Studio Ghibli picture. The whole device runs on plugins, and the nice thing is you can write your own. I'd been meaning to build a TRMNL plugin for a while, and I finally landed on an idea that was small enough to actually finish: show what I'm currently reading on StoryGraph.
Just three things, really. My profile name, what I'm currently reading, and the next couple of books in my to-read pile. That's it. A small project. I even said the words "basic, simple plugin" out loud, which in hindsight was me daring the universe.
The plan
TRMNL plugins can fetch their data a few different ways. The one that fit was polling: TRMNL pings a URL on a schedule, gets back some JSON, and renders it with a Liquid template. So I needed a small server that returns my reading data as JSON, plus the templates to lay it out on the screen.
The catch: StoryGraph doesn't have a public API. No tidy endpoint to call. If I wanted the data, I'd have to scrape it off my public profile page. I found a reference project, storygraph-api, that does exactly this, and it gave me the lay of the land: the URLs to hit (/currently-reading/username, /to-read/username) and the HTML structure of a book on the page.
