So, I have this thing. An old thing. I thought I killed it, now it’s back in a new form. And it’s insidious.
When I started my website, the biggest thing I intended to put on it was a set of my book reviews. I didn’t really know how many there would be, or how long it would take to write even one at a time, but it was what I saw as my main content. I had nothing else to blog about, I didn’t think.
I put a bunch on one site, changed the format of the site, re-did all the book reviews to match. Moved to a new site, had to fix and adjust all of them. This pattern continued on and off for a few years, and as long as the total number of reviews was less than 100, it was always “doable” to make a change and go back to edit all the previous ones. I did this maybe 5 or 6 times in total, not including small tweaks over time. I’m talking about a combination of both layout changes — the order of things, headings, etc. — as well as the content.
When I broke 100 reviews, I said, “That’s it. These are my reviews, this is the format, I am NEVER changing again.” Which was fine.
Then I had a huge site failure at one point, and I had to redo them all anyway (not in terms of re-writing them, I just had to manually post a bunch of them again). So around 200 reviews, when I was rebuilding, I said, “Okay, this is the ABSOLUTE last time” and that’s where it has stood since before the pandemic. I’m up to about 270 now with another 120 in backlog or so.
And I like the format of my book reviews, I do. I start with Plot or Premise (depending on fiction or non-fiction), write about What I Liked, then on to What I Didn’t Like (although for some books, I combine the two together), add in a disclosure section if I got the book for free or have met the author somehow, and then finish off with a “Bottom Line”. I went through almost 15 years of versions and wrestling with my muse about what I wanted to say in a Book Review, what was fair game and what wasn’t, etc. to get to this point.
I write the review, post it to Amazon Canada (used to share to Amazon US too), Chapters Indigo, my public library, Goodreads (used to do LibraryThing separately), and I publish on my own website. At one point, I also used to include Google Books, but I got out of that after a while. Since the first 200 or so were done, I narrowed it down to Amazon, Chapters, GoodReads, the OPL and my website.
I confess that I had hoped that my book reviews would spark commentary. That people would read them on various locations on the web, and comment…tell me they agreed, tell me they disagreed, etc.
That never happened. Heck, just like the rest of my blog, I rarely know if ANYONE is even reading my posts. It’s like the proverbial joke that writing on the bathroom wall would attract more eyeballs.
But I digress.
So, what’s new, pussycat?
No, not the Tom Jones song. What’s new is oddly enough NOT about the book reviews. It is about something related, which is my To Be Read (TBR) pile.
Way back when I was a young teenager, I started a two-page list of the main authors I was collecting, along with the list of books I needed. However, I didn’t always have complete lists, so if I knew about four books and bought two of them, I couldn’t simply add the remaining two to the list — there could be another ten that I didn’t know about. So, if I went into a store and saw a title that wasn’t on my list, I couldn’t be sure if I had it already or if it was “new” to me. This meant I ended up with a longer to-do list — all the books by author X or in series Y, with marks indicating whether I already owned them. Think of it like having a list of all the Agatha Christie books I could learn about (without having the internet yet), and printing it out on an 8.5×11″ double-sided sheet of paper, with at least three columns, and book titles down to about 8 or even 6 point font.
It had everything on it — what I had read, what I owned but hadn’t yet read, and what I hadn’t found yet. A collector’s list, if you will. Like Pokémon, you gotta get ’em all.
Around 1994 or so, I updated my list and then ignored it for about 10 years at least. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, I got the idea to recreate the list in new form! Except it is way out of control. Take even something like Star Trek novels. There are literally hundreds out there now in multiple sub-series. I don’t have time to track them all, let alone read them all. Or Perry Mason, with 75 books or so. Or the giant expanded Sherlock Holmes universe … it’s actually a research genre for academia, you can become a professor of Holmes’ materials, covering not only the original Holmes’ stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but also other stories involving Holmes, expanded stories involving characters from the Holmes’ books (like Irene Adler), or adding characters like Enola Holmes, a younger sister never mentioned.
I had a dream that when I eventually reviewed all my books, catching up on years of backlogs, I would also have my complete “wishlist” of all the series I wanted to complete. And I wanted it online, cuz I’m anal retentive. I have my own list in OneNote. Incomplete, of course, just as it was on the website.
But the indexing on the website has been holding me back. I recently wrote about a fascinating YouTube video and how it might help me adapt my approaches to certain projects.
And so I wanted to see what would happen if I applied it to my indexing of books in my website. The optimal solution would be, of course, that I would list all the authors I track, compile all the books that they have ever published but narrowed to those that I want to read, and publish the list. Easy peasy right? And then as I read them, I could mark them off.
Another optimal solution would be to take all of that info, throw it into a database, and publish the database in my website, allowing queries. Same research requirement, extra webbing.
A sub-optimal and my current practical solution has been to take the info for a given author, say John D. MacDonald who wrote the Travis McGee novels, upload the names of the 20+ books in the McGee series, and then paste links to the reviews as I write them. Sounds easy, right? Except that ended up being really painful. I was putting the info in one of 27 different pages, one for each letter of the alphabet and one for titles that started with numbers, creating a heading for John A. MacDonald, another sub-heading for Travis McGee, and then the titles of the 20+ books. Just to get to the place where I can link the FIRST review. But it was the only way I could see to put that full list online.
But when I reviewed it from the project management ideal of “what is the actual project”, the reality is that my goal has never really been nor should it have been to have my entire collection list online. Nobody cares about it except me. And I already have it in OneNote where I can see it easily. I thought I was making these lists as an easy way to show “hey, here are 20 books about Travis McGee” and the links to my review, which is cool, I admit. But it’s not “easy”, it was actually really time-consuming.
The REAL project is simply to get my book reviews online with a little bit of sorting capability. Was this helping me do this? Nope. I was acting like a card-carrying librarian, trying to create my own card catalogue system for every book I ever wanted to read or had read. So I wasn’t making progress. Yet I had 270+ entries across multiple pages and I couldn’t really see how to convert it into something better than an alphabetical list by title.
Oh, yeah, I can display posts by other variables
I thought I had a solution at one point for structured data of any type. I had a table plugin that was basically a front-end table maker and a back-end flat-file database manager. The benefit was that I could create a table say with the following columns:
- Book review #
- Title of book
- Author’s name
- Date of review
- Date of publication
- Rating
Maybe a dozen or so “fields”. And once it was in the table, yowza. I could sort on ANY column. Great, right? Well, sure, but it meant I had to put a lot of data in the back-end into fields. You COULD upload from a spreadsheet, which I did, but when I moved from a spreadsheet to something more functional and readable in OneNote, it was painful to enter or update. Way too much work, and the pages could be slow to load.
So I decided to ditch all the manual pages I had created. I could generate a list of all the book review posts by title, or date, and that seemed like probably good enough. I have a very structured title structure for every book review:
Title by Firstname Lastname (year of publication) — BRbook review # (Ryear of review) — rating
So for a previous review I did, the title of the post is:
Infection by John Gregory Betancourt (1999) – BR00004 (R2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪
It gives all the info I want at a quick glance, really easy for me to find stuff without having to go into the post if I’m looking for something while out and about. More reference for me than anything.
The downside is that I can ONLY sort on the title OR the date. I can’t sort by author name, year of publication, year of review or rating. The previous index pages were letting me sort by author name, but as I said, it was a lot of work to maintain those other 27 pages with all the extra info. Not just the pages of reviews that have been written, but the to do list of future books to read and review.
As I noted above, I said to myself, “Okay, let’s kill those pages and just go with the title or date sort.”
Except…
There might be another way to tweak my approach, get rid of the big work, add a bit more work back in, and let me sort on other things.
I can define some meta values per post
The WordPress system will let me define my own variables for posts, which because I already have a plugin that will sort on various fields, I can then sort on those fields.
I gave it a go the other night, and I took my first three book reviews. I created a new field called BR_number and I put in my five-digit BR number. I assume I’ll never make it past 10K, let alone 100K, but I’m good to 99999. I added another field called BR_name and for the first review, I put in the variable “davidpeter”. This is for Peter David, the author of the first book. This will let me sort on that field, which is last name first. I don’t have a way to access the main post and run concatenation to generate it all, but it’s good enough and short enough to do manually. I’m debating if I want to say “davidpeter1999” so the books by each author will come out in chron order, but haven’t decided yet.
I started to consider if I want to add in fields for ratings, year of publication, year of review, fiction/non-fiction, standalone or series, hardcover/paperback/ebook, and where I had published the reviews, but well, again, NOBODY cares about those features other than me, and I already have them coded on my OneNote pages. Optimal me would say YES, we should have ALL THE DATA, and even want to figure out ways to export / import from my Calibre ebook library would I would also have library categories, tags, ratings, all the other meta data I mentioned, # of pages, # of words, estimated grade level, and formats.
Let’s file that under #SquirrelMode.
I want to go with Name and Number, series is too much trouble. I’m on the fence for rating. But date is easy and obvious. I have one wrinkle to figure out. If I sort by title, all of the posts have the full alphabetical title…which is a fancy way of saying it says “The ….” and “A….” which the computer cannot ignore. If I want to fix that sort, I would have to add a field with a “sortable” book title. Love the premise, hate the amount of work to do it.
It’s all about the back work, not the forward work
If I do this, I want all 270+ reviews to show up in the various sort lists. Not just the ones from here onward. So if I do this, I would need to go back and recode all 273 books to date.
Coding forward is easy; coding backward is annoying. And, as I said, 270+ reviews to add metadata to, so that the future indexing works. Plus all future reviews, even if relatively straightforward.
As a digression, I created a test sort on the first three titles the other night, worked almost right, but I found I was getting something really weird as a result. The sort order wasn’t working the way I thought it should. It was inverted. No biggie, I switched it around, all good. Then I added another title, and nope, it didn’t sort right. I looked at examples, not figuring it out.
I finally emailed the plugin created and said, “I’m sorry to bother you but what am I missing…”. And it turned out to be a simple reference problem, some misleading nomenclature, and general ignorance on my part. It basically said something like “sort on variable” so I put in “sort on BR_name”. Except it literally meant to write the word variable, not the name of the variable. Oops. Not to mention: doh!
Way less work than it was, much greater functionality going forward, and it even looks better in the end. I just have to redo 270 reviews that I said I would NEVER CHANGE AGAIN. Sigh. Don’t even get me started on the fact that I should probably consider doing it for ALL my other reviews too (music, movies, TV seasons, recipes)…at least if I do it for those? It’s only about 50 in total. Not much work at all, in comparison.
Mostly, I’m wrestling with the Project Management question. Adding the extra variables doesn’t help me finish. It adds some functionality without reducing too much. And it’s a manageable albeit boring bit of work.
Sigh. Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll add the functionality to the BRs. But I am NOT going to put in a field to avoid sorting on “The” or “A” as part of the title. That’s a step too far.
