Building an Online Collection Library

One of the things that this little site of mine has spawned me to try to do is figure out once and for all how I want to organize my game collection tracking. I have up to this point used Collectorz.com which is a fair method of collection tracking, but I don't appreciate the subscription model and they don't really update enough to warrant the subscription either. You basically pay around $50 a year and get a handful of semi-useful updates for that fee. You are mostly just paying them for storage of your library which seems odd cause there are free versions. But they do have some advantages. For instance, it's a nice looking interface, they have a very customizable experience for adding and viewing libraries, and they do a good job of updating values of your games. But the other problem is that if I want to track other things, you kinda can't, and for smaller titles it takes quite awhile for their database to add a game which leads me to having to manually enter everything anyway.

I also don't think they have a viable way to display their stuff on a website such as this, though they have a decent import/export so I could always export to google sheets and display it that way, which I am fine with but for the price, I feel like they should kinda include a solution of some sort. So I decided to try to find a decent alternative that I could incorporate into this site somewhat. I know a lot of collectors just use google sheets, and I can embed sheets over here. It's not pretty but it works. I suspect there is some things I could do to spruce up the sheets as well to make them more viewable on a website that I would have to look into.

Then there is backloggery. In some ways backloggery would be my preferred route. It's free, it's attractive, it's pretty customizable, and it's pretty much just a spreadsheet. They recently did a refresh of the interface and it looks pretty good. But it doesn't have pricing or embeding on a site. They say they have a desire to create API which could then theoretically be used to pull data and put it on the site, but I suspect that is a long way out. They also don't have an import function which kinda sucks.

Even so, I'm contemplating using backloggery to input all my games and then export it to google sheets periodically which would then be used to display here. It means that it wouldn't be updated here in real time, and leads to some work because like if I get busy in life, in addition to not blogging, I'm also not going to update so it won't show a lot of stuff for maybe months. Which honestly is probably fine, I don't anticipate people would be coming to view my collection on a daily basis, I suspect people would come in, look at it, say "neat!" to themselves, and then never look again.

I do need to find a long term solution for my own needs, if nothing else though.