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Synchronization at Booklikes
The people in charge at Booklikes have a list of site improvements that they're working on. One of them is an export function! :)Until that is implemented, it might be a good idea to keep synchronization on from BL to GR, but once you can export from BL, you might not need that anymore.
And yes, for books I'm currently using BL as my main site, and GR as the backup. Serves them right, don't you think?
I have my synchronization on and only await the completion of the importation of books, which should be done by midnight Friday.I intend to stay with GR, but BL will be my backup. (I'm very much on a learning curve in coming to grips with BL.)
a word of warning:when you check out your newly imported GR-reviews on Booklikes, you may see that they are quite compressed, and their formatting is not as "pretty" as they were while here on Goodreads—TURN OFF THE SYNCHRONIZATION BEFORE FIXING THEM ON BOOKLIKES.
Otherwise you end up fixing them over there, and having the FIX ruin your formatting here because Automatic Synchronization... (been there, done that)
So, for now, I'm keeping the synchro OFF, while fiddling with Booklikes. Once everything (or as much as I can stomach) is looking good on Booklikes, I can decide to turn it on again.
Or not.
I'm actually considering only adding books but not reviewing at all on Goodreads anymore.
All reviewing and status updates etc would then be taken to Booklikes.
You can import a csv file from GR to BookLikes.You can Synchronize changes you make at BL to GR. That means as soon as you change a book (new shelf, write a review) that will show up here too (pretty quickly, if not instantly).
Both of these are optional. Both of these are one way (in opposite directions).
The first is a one time thing, the latter is ongoing. But you can turn it on and off whenever you like. When it's on, changes there show up here. When it's off, they don't.
BL promises other synchronization options later, but right now, this is what they have.
I have a regular Blogger blog too, so what I do is open everything, and copy the html I write in GR to the other places as well. It's the way I post my fanfiction on 8 sites so that it doesn't take forever.
Chrissie wrote: "I do not understand. Are you saying that the changes you make at BL are transferred to GR. I was told very clearly that the transfer is one way, only from GR to BL, not BL to GR! Please explain in detail what you mean. "you TRANSFER your files from GR to booklikes. One time thing.
THEN you can activate synchronization on booklikes, which means you only have to write it once, ON BOOKLIKES.
not the other way around. yet.
You were told very clearly wrong. :-)
I have synchronization off, because I'm going to be really picky about adding database information here.
AnnaLund wrote: "Chrissie wrote: "I do not understand. Are you saying that the changes you make at BL are transferred to GR. I was told very clearly that the transfer is one way, only from GR to BL, not BL to GR! P..."Excuse me, my message you quoted was wrong, but I got it right on message one.
Chrissie wrote: "Excuse me, my message you quoted was wrong, but I got it right on message one..."Hehe, no worries.
The important thing is that there are significant differences to how your review displays on the two sites, and that, before you start fixing them all on Booklikes, turn off the synchro, or your perfect reviews on GR will go ugly.
Does anyone know, if I do a second import from GR to BL - will already imported books double up? I suppose I could just go ask BL but I'm lazy
AnnaLund wrote: "The important thing is that there are significant differences to how your review displays on the two sites, and that, before you start fixing them all on Booklikes, turn off the synchro, or your perfect reviews on GR will go ugly. "It make sense what you are saying. I don't know where my head was......
Krazykiwi wrote: "You can import a csv file from GR to BookLikes.You can Synchronize changes you make at BL to GR. That means as soon as you change a book (new shelf, write a review) that will show up here too (pr..."
Please answer Catherine's question in message 11.
Chrissie wrote: "Please answer Catherine's question in message 11"Uhm. Yes ma'am.
I have no idea, and it's after hours on a Friday evening here in Europe, so I can't email them and ask for her.
I do know someone who asked them to blank their bookshelves after a dodgy import, in order to do it over, and they had no problem doing that for her.
I think I saw someone say that they have 24/7 support, probably because most of their new users are American.
Krazykiwi wrote: "Chrissie wrote: "Please answer Catherine's question in message 11"Uhm. Yes ma'am.
I have no idea, and it's after hours on a Friday evening here in Europe, so I can't email them and ask for her. ..."
I just thought you knew, not that you should ask them. Sorry for being unclear.
I'm thinking you should not periodically import to BookLikes. I'm waiting for my reviews to finish importing, but everyone who has them already seems to say any special formatting you've done with your GR review will require some tweeting at BL and they're working on making them pretty again. Wouldn't you have to go through that process all over again when you do a subsequent import? That's my guess anyway, until BL tells us differently.
I've noticed that the syncing doesn't work when the ISBN of the book you're reviewing on BL doesn't exist here on GR. I had to add a new edition on GR with the ISBN from the booklikes book, then refresh my booklikes review, then it synced. Most books go through fine though.
Mahlet wrote: "I'm thinking you should not periodically import to BookLikes. I'm waiting for my reviews to finish importing, but everyone who has them already seems to say any special formatting you've done with ..."That is what I am thinking! I also think you have to be careful with the synching too. If you have the synch on when you fix an imported file from GR, like a review for example, then it goes back to GR and messes up GR. See Anna's comments above.
Chrissie wrote:"you should not periodically import you have to be careful with the synching too. If you have the synch on when you fix an imported file from GR, like a review for example, then it goes back to GR and messes up GR. See Anna's comments above."But if you do mess up (happened to me when I tried to take out the GR-specific inner linkings to books etc. in about 20 reviews) the easiest way to repair the GR reviews is to go back into the exported CSV file (opened it in a text editor and used search), find a review and copy it including all the html-tags into your messed-up GR review.
oliviasbooks wrote: "But if you do mess up (happened to me when I tried to take out the GR-specific inner linkings to books etc. in about 20 reviews) the easiest way to repair the GR reviews is to go back into the exported CSV file (opened it in a text editor and used search), find a review and copy it including all the html-tags into your messed-up GR review. "LOL, that's what I'm doing right now. :D Just don't forget to take out the picture, or it'll be double.
I also took the opportunity to work a bit on my earlier reviews that weren't up to my standards now.
oliviasbooks wrote: "Chrissie wrote:"you should not periodically import you have to be careful with the synching too. If you have the synch on when you fix an imported file from GR, like a review for example, then it g..."Oh, so smart you are. That I wouldn't have thought of! Thank you.
Did anyone else have a problem importing books? The books show up when you click on the shelves, but it says I have 0 books.
I think there can be a delay between the two numbers aligning.
Hey everyone, sorry to budge in...but does anyone know how to input spoilers in a review on Booklikes?I just posted a reviews here on GR and copied and pasted it on Booklikes and the formatting is all over the place. I manually reformated the best part of it but I'm not having much luck with the spoilers.
Any suggestions?
Thank you
So far they haven't got a spoiler hide as GR, only a red notice in top where it say "spoiler alert!". If, when writing the review, you click spoiler on the right side below the review button you can get the spoiler alert.
I'll give it until tomorrow since it has been at least 20 hours by now :/
Oh, Zafia, you know everything!I have been importing since last TUESDAY! It takes longer than you think.
You could try "page break"?
I found BL shortly after ammy bought GR. So I've been using both sites simultaneous for a while.And btw it took roughly 53h for my +1500 books to transfer so patience may be the way to go.
How many books did you have? I only had just over 200. It went really quickly but there's about 5 that are taking soooo long.
Well mine says :Goodreads book import progress:
3203 - total number of books,
3046 - imported with reviews (if added),
0 - imported on your shelf - import of reviews is in progress,
0 - not recognized / removed,
157 - left.
Estimated time left: 10 hours
But this cannot be true since yesterday morning it said I had 11 hours left. I have lots of reviews.
Its windows minutes - eh not sure its a phrase the English use but its common where I'm from hehe.
Mahlet wrote: "I'm thinking you should not periodically import to BookLikes. I'm waiting for my reviews to finish importing, but everyone who has them already seems to say any special formatting you've done with ..."I am waiting for the reviews to finish importing too, so I can fix how they look on Booklikes. When you copy from a finished review on GR (not from edit), the links are good. But when you copy from edit here on GR, it is all over the place. As far as I can see, it will have to be done manually and with sync off, of course.
Now if only I weren't lazy...
Irena wrote: "When you copy from a finished review on GR (not from edit), the links are good."That is interesting. Have to try that, when the import is done.
Ellelou wrote: "Hey everyone, sorry to budge in...but does anyone know how to input spoilers in a review on Booklikes?I just posted a reviews here on GR and copied and pasted it on Booklikes and the formatting is all over the place. I manually reformated the best part of it but I'm not having much luck with the spoilers.
Any suggestions?
Thank you "
Here is a power reviewer that you should probably follow, Rameau has lots and lots of good tips and is a gorgeous person.
Here a link to her reblog of how to fix your spoilers:
http://rameau.booklikes.com/post/2207...
The CSV files... are we to type those up ourselves & if so, how are we to format them? Aside from author & title. Are you guys copy/pasting your actual reviews into the file?
Optimist ♰King's Wench♰ wrote: "The CSV files... are we to type those up ourselves & if so, how are we to format them? Aside from author & title. Are you guys copy/pasting your actual reviews into the file?"Go to "my books", then on the left click import/export. On that page click "export to a csv file" in the upper right hand corner. Then you can save it wherever on your computer, and import into BookLikes. You don't need to reformat anything in that file.
Sarah wrote: "Optimist ♰King's Wench♰ wrote: "The CSV files... are we to type those up ourselves & if so, how are we to format them? Aside from author & title. Are you guys copy/pasting your actual reviews into ..."Thank you so much. I've just gotten comfortable here & now...
Uh-oh.... I did edit a couple of the reviews I'd imported from GR to BL, because of the lack of spoiler tags on BL. My review text would say, "I'm hiding this next bit behind spoiler tags," and then, in the BL version, there'd be the big, fat spoiler. So I ended in putting in extra space and marking the whole review as having spoilers, but it didn't even occur to me that by having the synchronization, I've probably also done that to my original GR reviews. Now I have to remember which ones and fix them again here. GRRRR.
Mirkat wrote: "Uh-oh.... I did edit a couple of the reviews I'd imported from GR to BL, because of the lack of spoiler tags on BL. My review text would say, "I'm hiding this next bit behind spoiler tags," and t..."I tried these instructions for spoilers http://pagefault.booklikes.com/post/4...-
You get the clickable spoilers.
You may want to turn off synch not only when editing your own reviews, but also before you're reblogging those of others.I currently have it turned on, and I reblogged this on BookLikes a couple of minutes ago (with proper attribution to the author of course) -- only to have it show up here on GR as a review of my own, which it patently is NOT. I've edited the intro to the text to make that even clearer and will leave it long enough for others just to see what's happening, then will delete this review that isn't one of my own.
Pity, actually, as I wish I HAD written this truly awesome text by Killer Rabbit! :)
This may have been addressed somewhere else, but I'll throw it in here.I went to BookLikes and messing around added 1 book to my shelf. I already had it on my shelf at GR.
I then imported my GR books into BL. It added all books EXCEPT the 1. I did not change the shelves for that book. It just left it alone.
So....Looks like you can keep re-importing your books and it will ignore those that are already there.
Not a complete test but could be tried.
Irena wrote: "I tried these instructions for spoilers http://pagefault.booklikes.com/post/4...You get the clickable spoilers."
Thanks, I will give it a try. :)
Lee Anne - Give me a Good Romance wrote: "This may have been addressed somewhere else, but I'll throw it in here.I went to BookLikes and messing around added 1 book to my shelf. I already had it on my shelf at GR.
I then imported my GR ..."
Thanks!
It says that if I synchronise my GoodReads account with my BookLikes account it will keep up with reviews and adding shelves etc... Does it take a while to do or is it just not working? Anyone having problems?
I don't know anyone who is doing that. The reason is it screws up your reviews on GR if you change the review on BL.
Lee Anne - Has Lost Her Mind wrote: "I don't know anyone who is doing that. The reason is it screws up your reviews on GR if you change the review on BL."Lee, ya lost your mind?! *hug*
I've never had it turned on, which is perhaps good.
I did lose my mind. I think my kids were playing hide and seek with it today!
You only get synchronization from Booklikes(BL) to GR, NOT the other way around. Many of us are saying we want Booklikes as a backup, but how do we achieve that? If we want to keep the information on the two sites the same, then either we put on the synchronization and make all alterations at BL
OR
no synchronization, but for every darn change we make we must make the changes at both places. NOT so fun.
Another alternative might be to turn off the synchronization and instead periodically import an updated CSV file from GR to BL. I don't know if this works. What happens to books that are already registered at BL? Do they appear twice? If you have changed how a book is shelved at GR, will the GR version override how it was previously shelved at BL? What if you change a review at GR? Then if it doesn't appear twice you must remember to go back and fix all the things that don't get transported correctly! I don't see this as a good alternative. How many of us want to spend time fixing everything rather than reading books?
So what do I end up thinking? In reality it does not work to keep BL as a back-up to GR unless we move over to BL and function from there, make all our changes there and put on the synchronization. In reality GR becomes a back-up to BL, not the other way around.
Am I thinking wrong?