I use a bunch of media tracking sites since I like having stats for the stuff I’m reading, watching, and playing. Since I’m quite mercurial about when I engage with any particular media, I like having the reminder of where I am at in any particular TV show, anime, or book.

I use Storygraph for tracking my novel reading, and I like the focus it has on stats.

However, I have several nitpicks about the UI and other parts of the site:

1. I wish it had a view that displayed more (or all) books by just their covers (I use anilist as an example of this for anime/manga).
2. I want other people to see not only what books I’m reading, but my progress in that book too.
3. The monthly calendar view from the monthly stats wrap-up should be on the stats page and not just an image (so it’s somewhat accessible).
4. The data export doesn’t contain the reading log data, which makes it not that useful. That means you can’t currently take your reading log data with you if Storygraph ever shuts down.
5. Most of the books I’m reading need to have their metadata corrected or entered by myself. (I read a lot of niche light novels or webnovels).

All of these factors put together made me want to create something on my own, that I could enter my reading data into and have the data stored portably.

​​​What I came up with (with the help of Gemini) was a server-side-rendered Astro site that stores book dats in a single JSON file. Because I use Netlify for hosting, I’m able to use Netlify Blobs for live data hosting, and Netlify Functions to make backups, edits to the data, and render the site “live”.

You can test the site out for yourself here: https://astro-reading-tracker.netlify.app/

Just use “demoreadingtracker” as the password and you can test how all the functions work.

I’ve also provided a link to the github repo below:

​2026-08-08 edit: I feel a little silly for forgetting this, but you can see my actual reading tracker at https://reads.pomnavi.net/.