July 2008 Ever since I added the Amazon links, they've been pretty stable, both the links themselves and the images I link to. But recently almost all of the image links have been broken, which leads to ugly looking pages with no images. So I wrote a Python script that checks each image link for validity, and if any links for a given book are broken, re-does the Amazon search for the book and updates the links.
February 2008 Amazon had been sending me emails saying they'd be discontinuing support for the old web services API in a couple of weeks, and I was thus forced to spend time switching over to the new API. Sounds simple enough, but it wasn't. The Python bindings for the new API were not as mature as they were for the old one, so I had to edit them to add in missing functionality. Also, Amazon had changed the way information is returned back quite considerably so it took some time to get everything working again. Also regenerated images/links for all books and enhanced my script for editing existing data a bit.
September 2006 Converted the two remaining Perl scripts to Python and in the process tweaked comment input, storage and formatting to make writing long comments easier. Optimized graph generation algorithm from O(nm) to O(n+m), where n = number of days and m = number of books.
March 2006 Added the price comparison page.
December 2005 Changed the feed format from RSS 1.0 to Atom and made the feed entries point to the permanent page for each review instead of pointing to current.html.
May 2005 Added support for Wiki-style links to other reviews (see this for an example).
April 2005 Revamped the whole thing: Amazon links, cover images, grouped by year, author/name lists, optional separate page for each book, totally different layout (done with CSS), RSS feed, spoiler protection, etc. Also, it's using Python now.
December 2002 Added a chart showing how the total number of books I've read has progressed.
September 2001 Added the possibility of giving books a rating of "Unrated".
July 1999 Moved the database from flat ascii files to a real database (PostgreSQL).
November 1997 Changed the rating system to allow half stars to be given.
September 1997 Replaced the bash script with a Perl one that allowed me to include comments about the books.
April 1997 Project started. One bash script and one text datafile.