Warning: This is a solution looking for a problem. It’s also aimed at people who have the ability to execute ruby scripts.

I’ve seen a few people ask for this, and I’ve been after a way to do this myself: a facility on RedBubble that lets you export a full list of your works (or, at the very least, your art) so that you can do something else with it elsewhere.

Today I got to thinking that it should be possible to scrape the data from my public art page. A bit of hacking with ruby later (using its “net/http” and “rexml/document” modules) and I had something that produced a very simple tab-delimited text file containing the work ID and the work title (given these two items it’s pretty easy to infer everything else).

Like I say: this is a bit of a solution looking for a problem right now, but a quick test with Google Docs shows that the file imports nicely as a spreadsheet:

I’m also thinking that such data could be handy as the starting point for writing a tool that generates some sort of front-end (on one of my own sites) into my works on RedBubble.

If you think this sounds interesting, and if you’re able to run ruby scripts, pop over here and grab a copy.

v1.6 of this script has been released.

Hi Dave,
Interesting stuff but I am no programmer, in fact I am just about useless with this stuff but I have passed it over to a friend/colleague of mine who is more clued in. But nice of you to share what may turn out to be a very time saving & useful tool.

Thanks Philip.

This approach (writing it as a ruby script) does have the “con” that many people won’t be in a position to use it (unless they install ruby on their system). The main “pro”, however, is that it’ll run on every operating system that has a version of ruby (which is pretty much all popular operating systems).

Hopefully a facility such as this will be added to RedBubble itself at some point in the future and a hack like this won’t be needed.

I’ve now made use of this script to build a small front end for my RedBubble account.

I’ve just released v1.7 of this tool. The two main changes in this release are:

• The script can now optionally download a list of clothing.
• The output now also includes the URL of the default thumbnail for each work. This is most useful when dealing with clothing because working out such a URL post-download is almost impossible.

You can download getrbart from here.