Feed my A(chievement)ddiction

When reading a couple of my reviews it is probably not hard to notice that I’m unhealthily obsessed keenly interested in Steam achievements. As with everything I track, I wanted an RSS feed of them. Of course that isn’t something Valve themselves offer, and the only third-party option I found was unusably slow and unreliable.¹

So I did it myself: steam-achievement-tracker is an abomination of a PHP “application” that grabs your Steam achievements from the API and serves them as an RSS feed. I’m not kidding, it’s the kind of project that gives PHP a bad name. But: It works. It is blazingly fast as it only has to serve a single person. The feed items look a billion times better than what the unreliable thing served. So I’m quite happy with it! 🚀

While I was at it I figured I’d add a web interface as well. It’s pretty barebones, but I like the option to deep-link specific achievements. I also wasted way too much time on trying to render a pretty preview image when posting such a link on Mastodon, or sending it on a messenger. (It does generate one, but it looks absolutely awful.)
There’s a few more things I’ll want to add to the web interface – sorting by rarity, filtering by game, maybe a statistics page.

A neat side effect that I hadn’t even considered initially: I now have a SQLite database with all my Steam achievements! As opposed to playtime information, this can all be gathered retroactively. Not sure what it will look like exactly, but I’m looking forward to integrate that into the gaming section of my automated media diet posts. 📊