Everything Booklikes & Leafmarks discussion

What screen should you work from if you want to systematically fix all your reviews, without forgetting one?

Please explain which screen you should be on.
I started on "shelf" and "reviewed". I cannot see the reviews, so I certainly cannot fix them.

Am I upset? Yes, but I am telling myself everyone is going through this. Please give simple advice, not html stuff for computer whizzes.

Thank you.

The only place I've found that has the 'edit' button for your reviews is from your own blog. And I've had to scroll through the books - if I try to search for a specific book, there's no edit button.

What I've been doing is going to my 'blog' (the link at the top of the page) and allowing the whole long list to load (takes a few minutes if you have a lot of books - just keep scrolling down the list until they all load in). Then I systematically go through the reviews. The ones I want to edit I tell the browser to load the edit in another tab (this is done differently on each OS and browser - I'm on a Mac with Safari, so I press the command key while clicking the 'edit' button).

If you don't load the 'edit review' page in another tab/window, then you have to wait for the damn blog to reload all the books again from scratch each time you return.

If anyone has discovered an easier way, please let us know!! :)

I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but my shelves say I've "read" 191 books (accurate), but that I've "reviewed" 605 (not right at all). And when you go to the book page, there's no link to your review, so no way to delete reviews that aren't supposed to be there.

I'll probably email support and ask them about it, because I have no idea how this site works still. ._.

Thalia (Against GR Censorship) wrote: "I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but my shelves say I've "read" 191 books (accurate), but that I've "reviewed" 605 (not right at all). And when you go to the book page, there's n..."

I just emailed them about that reviewed shelf, too. And blogged over there in case another member had already figured it out. Plus mine has weirdly fluctuated as to how many books are on that shelf.

Go to dashboard, click on shelf, go to table view (right hand side of page). From table view you can see your books in a table with the following headers

cover, title, author, rating, my review, shelves, date read.

If you have not reviewed the book the my review column will say add review. If you have reviewed the book it will say see review. Click on see review. Click on reblog (right side of page). The review will open in a window where you can edit it. Then when you are finished click save, and it will save the review to both your shelves and your blog.

This is the only way I have figured out how to do it so far. From table view you can also change which shelves a book appears on, and change read dates. You can also check mark several books and move them to another shelf as a group.

Bunny wrote: "Click on reblog (right side of page). The review will open in a window where you can edit it. Then when you are finished click save, and it will save the review to both your shelves and your blog...."

This doesn't duplicate your books/reviews?

Yeah it does repost them to the blog. You don't end up with two different versions of the review on your shelf though.

Bunny, your method is much easier than scrolling through the whole blog list! Thank you.

Bunny, isn't it possible to first click on your review shelf before you go to the table view of the shelf? then I would put them in order (like title) to systematically go through all of them.

Bunny, I am working in text, not html, when I write the review. Is it possible to get a link to work when I write in the text box for the review? There is a little html icon at the top right. What is that for? Would that help me get a link in? When I did that I got a screen that I understood nothing on!

BIG THANKS - (((Bunny))).

BTW, yesterday my import was complete but today the number of books increased anyhow. So it was not really complete it seems.


Jennifer, check out Bunny's message 5!

I'm going to post this here as well:

I found a way to do a search for specific reviews on your dashboard blog page without having to scroll down the page. At the top of your Windows page tool bar (where you see File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help), select "Edit", then select "Find On This Page", type in a key word such as the title or a word from the title, and the page will go right to the review you are seeking.

Sorry, I meant the menu bar located on the upper left hand corner of your computer screen:



Yes, if you're on the blog page of your personal dashboard (the blog tab), then you should be all set. :) I noticed that you have to scroll down the page a little bit when you first open the blog page so that all of the items can load before you can use the "find" feature. Just drag the scroll bar down a bit and you should be all set.

Does anybody know of a way to easily find one book and adjust how it is shelved? I know you can do this on "shelf" in the "table view", but to find the book there is time consuming.

Chrissie wrote: "Does anybody know of a way to easily find one book and adjust how it is shelved? I know you can do this on "shelf" in the "table view", but to find the book there is time consuming."

I haven't done much of this, but if you go into the search bar that currently defaults to amazon, and click the down arrow button on the left of it, you can choose the magnifying glass that says 'bookshelf' (NOT the magnifying glass on the right of the search box). That should search just your shelves for specific books.

I've been 'sorting' them by either author or title after I've selected table view.

On the book cover discussion, if you save the image that is connected with your GR review, how is that any different from exporting books and reviews over? Apologies if this has already been answered.

❂ Jennifer wrote: "go into the search bar that currently defaults to amazon, and click the down arrow button on the left of it, you can choose the magnifying glass that says 'bookshelf' (NOT the magnifying glass on the right of the search box). That should search just your shelves for specific books. "

I don't understand.What screen should I be on and where is the search bar?

Suzanne wrote: "I've been 'sorting' them by either author or title after I've selected table view.

On the book cover discussion, if you save the image that is connected with your GR review, how is that any differ..."

When I am at "table view" of the "shelf" screen and I click on sorting by author, I get a table that has no authors listed in the author column! What am I doing wrong?

@ Chrissie

The search box is located all the way at the top of the booklikes screen: so you have the Booklikes logo, next to that you'll see Dashboard, Blog, Shelf, Timeline, then the search box. It defaults to the little a for Amazon, so press on the arrow button, then choose "bookshelf", then type in the book you're looking for. Choose the book, then scroll down to the highlighted box that either says "Read" or "Plan to Read", etc. Click on it, then the box will expand, scroll down a little until you see "edit shelves", then you can select the shelves.

You're welcome. Someone told me there is a keyboard shortcut, Control F, which will pull up the find/search box in one easy step. As you can probably tell, I'm not the most computer savvy person in the world. :) In any case, I think that shortcut should work on most web browsers.

Chrissie wrote: "Suzanne wrote: "I've been 'sorting' them by either author or title after I've selected table view.

On the book cover discussion, if you save the image that is connected with your GR review, how is..."

I just went back to check and I have one book that is missing an author, the rest are listed from what I can see. I'm assuming blank cells appear before the alpha sorted listed ones.

Rachel wrote: "I'm going to post this here as well:

I found a way to do a search for specific reviews on your dashboard blog page without having to scroll down the page. At the top of your Windows page tool bar ..."

When I click on edit I am not given the possibility of looking for a word! I also tried ctrl F - it failed too. I have firefox. Is that why?

Your message 17 failed also, but I found another way:

To fix shelves of one particular book:

1. Go to "shelf" screen
2. Click on "blog shelf"
3. Write book title on search screen at left
4. click on book that appears
5. Click on "add to bookshelf"
6. Edit shelves and
7. Save

RE: Faster way of editing reviews on BL, I got this response from Kate @ BL:

Hi.
Soon we'll add search box in admin blog view to make it easier and faster to search and edit reviews. Hope it will be useful.
Best,
Kate

Hope "soon" will be soon. :)

Suzanne, I will go and see if the author names appear on the second page when I sort by author.

Yes, they do.

I still cannot anywhere search for one book title and end up on a screen where I can edit a previously written review. I need advice please. Rachael's method (the CTRL F search) failed for me.

Chrissie wrote: "I still cannot anywhere search for one book title and end up on a screen where I can edit a previously written review. I need advice please. Rachael's method (the CTRL F search) failed for me."

I had the same problem, I was just going to check my back up file, copy that onto a word doc to edit. Then delete the book from BL and re add it with the edited review. Know that there is probably an easier way and hoping it won't be too many reviews I need to do this for.

Chrissie wrote: "I still cannot anywhere search for one book title and end up on a screen where I can edit a previously written review. I need advice please. Rachael's method (the CTRL F search) failed for me."

Sorry it didn't work for you, Chrissie. I noticed that if I didn't scroll down a bit on the page, it wouldn't find what I was looking for because all items hadn't loaded yet. For some reason, when you first open the dashboard blog page it only loads a few of the first items. Try pulling the scroll bar all the way down to the bottom & up again in order to ensure that all of the items on the blog dashboard load, then try searching using ctl F again. Hopefully that will work.

Edited to add: I also wonder if the command codes are different on your keyboard than the one I have here in the USA? Did a "find/search" box come up when you hit ctl f?

Rachel wrote: "Chrissie wrote: "I still cannot anywhere search for one book title and end up on a screen where I can edit a previously written review. I need advice please. Rachael's method (the CTRL F search) fa..."

Rachel the problem was that the search function through Windows edit did not work. I could never type in a word I wanted to search for.

No, ctrl F did not give me a search box!

I found 62 books with the date read being 1/1/1970. These are all wrong. I found other errors too. One book was read on April 9, this year but at BL it is Sept 4, this year! I suggest that others check the dates when their books are read to see if the info is correct.

Chrissie wrote: "
Rachel the problem was that the search function through Windows edit did not work..."

Darn. Sorry. :( Booklikes said they are working on a search function for reviews so hopefully they will roll that out A.S.A.P.

Rachel, I sure hope so!!!!

I have a question about doing a reblog. If you reblog one of your own blogs, and in doing that fix the errors that occurred in the import, does the "review" get changed too. I guess I could go and look at the reviews in the "table view" of the shelf tab to see if a review I have written on GR has been altered after rebloging it.

I've been mostly offline for over a week and am trying to catch up, so sorry if this isn't the best thread for this question, but Has anybody tried importing to BookLikes from LibraryThing? And, if so, are the same formatting problems seen?

I've been going way, way too slowly manually adding my books to LT, needing to make changes to nearly every book. If I could get all my books over there (for me it's just a book cataloging site) they'd be correct there, but many aren't here, and I'm wondering if it's any better importing from there.

Anybody know?

Thanks.

If I do put all my books onto BL, I'll probably do so automatically. I just don't have time to enter 10,000 manually (nearly 4,000 ratings and over 2,200 reviews) one by one in 2 more places. What a pain. I knew I should have gone as quickly as possible when the original buyout announcement was made. Procrastinator me. How dare I want to spend some of my free time actually reading! Ha!

Another related question:

Who's importing directly from Goodreads and who is importing from .cvs files on their computers? What's the difference in results, if any, at BookLikes?

Thanks for any information.

Well, and one of my problems is that I have a lot of books without ISBNs, so my guess is I'll have to manually add books. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

I wish I felt I had more time before further calamity here. If I could get over ALL my books to LT, correctly!, I'd probably be willing to pay someone to get them properly over to BL.

I'm really, really, really irked at Goodreads right now!!!

Thanks, Xox, but I have MANY reviews and many read books. The to-read books I figure I could "fix" once I read them. Also, the non-ISBN books are likely to not show up AT ALL (that's my understanding) and it would be very hard going through my .cvs files (I'm not at all skilled in using Excel) to figure out which ones I'd need to manually enter. I feel very overwhelmed. I so wish I'd concurrently used LT all along.

Lisa wrote: "Another related question:

Who's importing directly from Goodreads and who is importing from .cvs files on their computers? What's the difference in results, if any, at BookLikes?

Thanks for any ..."

All GR imports to BL are from csv files. If you clikc on import from Goodreads at BL it asks you where to find the csv file, in other words it doesn't import directly from Goodreads, it just lets the BL database know you are importing a csv file with Goodreads type categories.

Thanks, Xox. I've always backed up my books, and quotes too. Now I'm backing up books daily, or whenever I make any significant change.

Thanks, Bunny. That's good to know. I'd probably still be better off getting all my books, corrected from messed up states due to incompetent but I assume well meaning GR librarians, and doing .cvs files from LT vs. GR. I'd have a bit less clean up to do.

This is a pain. At least I can always import my latest .cvs files.

Bunny wrote: "Lisa wrote: "Another related question:

Who's importing directly from Goodreads and who is importing from .cvs files on their computers? What's the difference in results, if any, at BookLikes?

Th..."

There used to be a transfer-type-import (for lack of a better term) option, where BL would use an API with GR (not a .csv file) to import your books. BL has disabled that feature because of GR's accusation that there's a bug someplace on BLs end (nope).

You can still (at least if GR hasn't messed with it) download your own .csv file of your bookshelves from here and import it to BL but it's a different function than the API which was another way to get your library over there.

Barbara ♥~Lindt Ninja~♥ wrote: "Bunny wrote: "Lisa wrote: "Another related question:

Who's importing directly from Goodreads and who is importing from .cvs files on their computers? What's the difference in results, if any, at B..."

Synchronization transfers from BL to GR. Import through a CSV file is from GR to BL. We are talking two different directions. Synchronization has been stopped.

Did anyone ever hear back from their inqueries about the review shelf not matching up with the number of reviews written? Mine is about twice the actual number.

Natalie wrote: "Did anyone ever hear back from their inqueries about the review shelf not matching up with the number of reviews written? Mine is about twice the actual number."


Hi, mine did that too, but I noticed that once I clicked on the covers of the books, those without reviews would disappear from the shelf leaving only those with reviews. Not great if you have a lot of books on that shelf, but might be a work around.

Ulrike [Disclaimer: My opinion is not paid for by Amazon.] wrote: "Hi, mine did that too, but I noticed that once I clicked on the covers of the books, those without reviews would disappear from the shelf leaving only those with reviews. Not great if you have a lot of books on that shelf, but might be a work around.

Thanks, that worked!

Rachel wrote: "You're welcome. Someone told me there is a keyboard shortcut, Control F, which will pull up the find/search box in one easy step. As you can probably tell, I'm not the most computer savvy person in..."

Find only works for items on the page. If you have a lot of reviews (table view, your blog, or your timeline) and they all don't show on current page -- "find" won't.

May have better luck searching by tags (dashboard or blog, at right under top menu bars you can search by tags) depending on how you've titled reviews.

I know now to actually add a unique tag name to my reviews as a way to find them again and I add to title "Review of title by author" -- but i ported reviews won't have that yet.

I was tempted to start a new thread for this but it's probably better to just post in this thread.

Does anybody know what happens with pre-ISBN books if an import from cvs files is done?

Do they not get transferred over at all? Get there as blank books? What?

Thanks for any information.

Lisa wrote: "I was tempted to start a new thread for this but it's probably better to just post in this thread.

Does anybody know what happens with pre-ISBN books if an import from cvs files is done?

Do they ..."

There's a risk they won't get imported, because BookLikes primarily uses ISBN to locate books -- you may be lucky, though, if BL finds the same book by title and author in the current catalogue of one of the booksellers they're using to source books.

I had more than one pre-ISBN book on my shelves here on GR, but only one of them was reported as not traceable at all. Seems I was lucky, though; others have been told that a substantial larger number of their books can't be traced and, therefore, not be imported.

Themis-Athena (“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson) wrote: "Lisa wrote: "I was tempted to start a new thread for this but it's probably better to just post in this thread.

Does anybody know what happens with pre-ISBN books if an import from cvs files is do..."

But doesn't everything except the cover get imported? Doesn't the review and the shelves and the rating for the book get imported?

All of my books were imported too, but the covers had to adjusted on some. Some were without ISBNs.

In my case, I lucked out and all my books, even non-isbn ones, did import. Some edituon corrections needed and covers to edit, but they all seem to be there.

Chrissie wrote: "But doesn't everything except the cover get imported? Doesn't the review and the shelves and the rating for the book get imported?"

Only if they can source the books on your shelves through the book sellers they are cooperating with. If a book has no ISBN, that may not be possible -- it then essentially depends on whether the book is still available for sale at all.

E.g. you may have a book on your shelves that was first published pre-ISBN, and because you actually own a pre-ISBN edition (e.g., a copy you inherited from your parents or grandparents), you've put that edition on your shelves here on Goodreads. But the book itself is still available for sale, and later editions (say, by Penguin or Oxford University Editions) HAVE been given an ISBN, and they're also still available from, say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble. In that event, while BookLikes might not be able to find the precise pre-ISBN edition you have on your shelves here on Goodreads, they may still be able to source other editions of the book through the sellers with whom they are cooperating, and one of those other editions will then be added to your shelves on BookLikes.

If, on the other hand, they are dealing with a pre-ISBN book that is no longer in the "for sale" catalogues of any of the book sellers with whom BookLikes is currently cooperating (not even by title and author name -- say it's out of print and Amazon, for example, doesn't even have used copies listed by Amazon Marketplace sellers), then BookLikes has no way to identify that book anywhere, and they won't be able to put it on your shelves.

They have promised to introduce librarian powers similar to what we have here, and all users can already add book covers (plus Steve McKinney has come up with a way to add title and author names, here: http://smckinney.booklikes.com/post/5... ). So I'm hoping some time after they've introduced consolidated book pages (which I think are a priority) they will also give us the ability to add books to the BookLikes catalogue that aren't actually sourced through a major online book store. But we're not quite there yet ...

I have discovered that while my .csv file imported properly (I checked on my Import page), the books on my shelf do not match what came over. For example, I have some 70 books with no author, and a handful more translated into German (I think). But, the info shows up on the Import as correct. BL did something to them during the shelving process. I have no way of knowing at a glance how many books have incorrect data. I'm a bit discouraged, and their fix (change the books on the Import page) won't work when the Import page is correct and the shelf isn't. Unless I want to remove and reshelve a bunch of my books.

I'm not too excited about learning how to edit html, either. I am a bit disappointed at this stage. This is requiring way too much time to fix. I may just ignore my old entries for now. *sigh*

Themis-Athena (“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson) wrote: "Chrissie wrote: "But doesn't everything except the cover get imported? Doesn't the review and the shelves and the rating for the book get imported?"

Only if they can source the books on your shelv..."

Now I really understand. Thanks for explaining thoroughly. All of mine were imported, so I was lucky!

Chrissie wrote: "All of mine were imported, so I was lucky!"

All the better for you, then! :)

Jeannette wrote: "I have discovered that while my .csv file imported properly (I checked on my Import page), the books on my shelf do not match what came over. For example, I have some 70 books with no author, and..."

Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that what gets imported is the info as it is registered at GR. So if something is messed up at GR it will remain messed up at BL. I don't think information is actually lost in the transfer. If the author's name is not properly registered at GR, it will not be at BL either.

You don't have to write in html. Use the text box instead.

Hey, I just now learned how to change my background colour. It's a learning curve. We'll figure it out :)