T-SQL Tuesday 161 – Having Fun

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic comes from Reitse Eskens who asks us to share some fun we’re having with our code. I’ve had my share of side projects that have kept me busy. One stuck out in my mind which I’ll discuss below.

To read the full T-SQL Tuesday invitation for this month, click the T-SQL Tuesday logo to the right.

Comic Book Tracker

As you may have guessed from example scripts on this site, I’m a big comic book fan. TV and movies are great, but to me there’s something about comic books that do more to “draw” me in.

To keep track of what I read, I used to have an account with a site called comicbookdb.com. It wasn’t flashy but it was consistently updated with new comics and old comics alike. Once I finished reading a comic, I’d check a box that it was read and my collection would be updated. I could then find more issues, storylines, and get recommendations on what to read next.

In the Gutter

Like all good things, it eventually came to an end and shutdown with the claim that it would come back better than ever…someday. Maybe that day will come but it hasn’t come yet.

Before going offline, I had time to export my data so it wasn’t lost forever. I took the export of data and built my own database and scripts to track stats, generate reports, and find correlations between creators.

Unfortunately, if something new needed to be added, I had to do it myself. I toyed with the idea of automatically pulling in data from other sites using Python but I never got my process exactly how I wanted it. Overall, my tracker wasn’t perfect, but it worked for what I needed.

Onto the Next

Managing comics myself took more time than I wanted to spend. I didn’t want to be stressed about entering a cover, creator info, etc. while trying to enjoy a new book.

I ended up rebuilding my collection on a site called https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/ which is much more user friendly and comprehensive than what I had ever used. I still export my data on a regular basis “just in case” and can load it into database if I want to do my own querying but hopefully https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/ won’t be going away anytime soon.

Thanks for reading!