Tag: BookLikes

TTthhhppphhttt. How’s that for a state of mind?

Life has been busy – mostly not in any enjoyable way; we’re still covid free here but other factors of real life have kept us hopping, forcing me to pretty much check out of all my online activities save the bare minimum.  The bare minimum has been logging my books and in quiet moments at work, building up my super-spreadsheet of All The Books and Their Reviews.  I’ve also been working on some things at the new beta site, Bookhype.com (more on that in a different post).

I’m trying with the blog, I really am.  But it’s a pain in the ass.  Even with the classic editor, or whatever the hell they call it, I can’t just whip off a post.  If it’s about books, I have to make sure the book data is entered, I have to chase down the cover, I have to link 800 things and click on several pages.  Pain. in. the. ass.  And trying to follow comments and other people’s posts is damn near impossible – the WordPress app only notifies me about random comments and shows me only about, I suspect, a third of the posts of those I’m following.

I’ve also been trying with GoodReads groups, but that’s working even less well.  Too many threads to read and keep up with; my soul shrivels every time I open the groups and see all the unread messages.  And I hate the site anyway.

All of which to say, while I’m still not going to give up on this blog, I’m sticking with BookLikes.  Pressing performance issues aside (which haven’t been that bad for me the last several weeks), the site is perfectly designed for me as a reader and book tracker.  I’ll safeguard my data so I don’t get left in the lurch if things finally go belly up, but until then, I’m hanging on.

So, with the way things are going over at BookLikes, I’ve dragged myself kicking and spitting back over to my blog, and have spent at least the last two weeks swearing at WordPress and the dearth of plug-ins that do what I want done.  WordPress has been such a pain in my ass that I’ve been *this* close to building my own damn database a couple of times, but finally, a few days ago, I stumbled across a Pay plug in called Book Library, created by someone called Nose Graze.  It does both more and less than what I want it to do, but mostly more.  It allows me to build my own book database, though I can’t bulk upload; it tracks my reading, though I haven’t figured out how to do pages over percentages, and the widget lacks a progress bar; and it allows me to track multiple editions, multiple reads, and purchase dates and locations.  Oh! and series.  So it’s more win than loss, but I still find WP clunky as hell.

I’m still using BookLikes when it will allow me, and I hold out some hope that someone will, someday, see the value in what’s there.  If I could buy it, I would, but I can’t even justify buying books (though I was pissed off enough to buy the plug-in) so unless they give it away, I’m stuck here.  It could be worse; I could be stuck with nothing but GoodReads.

Anywho, my tiny corner of the world is back in lockdown until at least mid August, because people don’t listen to what they don’t want to hear, and mistook flattening of the curve to elimination of the virus, and now it’s raging through Victoria.

After three months of not taking advantage of the first lockdown, MT and I finally got it together the second time around and have been kicking numerous home projects to the curb.  Our library is finally done – pictures to follow in the next post – and today we’re getting a new toilet installed – pictures not to follow; this was NOT one of our projects, but the toilet decided it just couldn’t go on any longer – or, more specifically, the seal between it and the floor gave way and the thing was so old it wobbled.  Also, my kettle is acting ominously, because nothing says Pandemic induced financial crisis like all the most crucial appliances dying at once.  But the house is clean and organised, pictures are almost all hung where they should be, and my library is done – and I have empty shelves!!