Everything Booklikes & Leafmarks discussion

One of the functions I like at GR is the ability to note your progress by which page you're on or what % you've read, with a place for you to note your thoughts as you go. It's useful for me because I'm a serial reader, usually with several books on different formats at a time, and may be working through some books for months before I finish. It helps me put together my thoughts for a review when I'm done, or sometimes it's a substitute for a review. How is everyone handling this at BL? Are you just making blog posts as you go? Is there an equivalent function at BL planned?

Go to book reading (click from sidebar with "currently reading," change search from booksellers using by clicking the logo and changing to search on your bookshelf to find, click " shelf" to spot ...) and there is a spot to put yonr reading progress.

Booklikes lets you track progress by hours, pages or percentage so does better with audiobooks than goodreads.

Booklikes doesn't let you directly make status update comments when you update reading status.

Most of us seem to be creating a blog post with progress, title and author in title and tags of blog post for first status update. Next update, we search for that blog post, edit post date to be "now," edit progress amount in title, edit blog post to put new status, add a page break. Then keep repeating so that the blog post always has the most updated status with a page break so that all your older statuses only show when you click the green "Read more."

That post with all your status updates can be edited to write your review. Some friends are doing the one big combined post but saving as un-posted draft until finished and ready to write their review (meaning they can see their updates but updates not posted out to the feed until they finish).

Others just put % progress in blog title (plus book/author in title and search tags); then when ready to write review, they'll click "blog" instead of "dashboard" and search for that book to see all the status posts. (May have some scrolling to do if you made a lot of posts).

What I have done is exactly what I did at GR. I write at the top how much I have read and what is going through my head. Then, when I want to write more about the same book, I edit the earlier blog entry and reblog it. I add a heading with how much I have now read and my new thoughts. The important thing is to add the added text at the beginning of the earlier blog entry. This is good because then people do not have to reread what you wrote earlier! That would be boring for them.

This was very helpful. Thank you! I've successfully added the reading progress on one of my books. Next I just need to try the status update blogs. I haven't actually done any blog posts yet, just imported my books from GR. I like the idea of continually editing my blog posts until the book is complete, so all my thoughts (such as they are) are in one place. It'll work best for me since sometimes the updates substitute as a review for me. I rarely attempt the sort of comprehensive, thoughtful reviews that so many talented others write. I love reading them, but I'm not much of a writer.

I do it a little differently. In dashboard view, my "currently reading" books are posted on the right. I just click on the cover it pulls up a little box with the cover of the book and some options, click on the "currently reading" tab, and you can update your progress from there.

I also create "Status Update" blog posts as detailed by Debbie. Right now we are all sort of finding our way. It's very different than GR and the status update percentage is not attached to your comments so it's a bit of a pain to workaround but with some fiddling it's doable.

All this is helpful, but I'll still miss GR style status updates.Thanks for the info!

I use Bark Less Wag More's method of changing progress updates. (Speaking of which, I need to go change one...)

Sheri wrote: "This was very helpful. Thank you! I've successfully added the reading progress on one of my books. Next I just need to try the status update blogs. I haven't actually done any blog posts yet, just ..."

The little page break icon at left of HTML will break up the really long posts on everyone's dashboard (puts that green "Read more" button breaking up longer oosts).

If you put below your most recent status, then to see older statuses other booklikers just click "read more" … that way followed/follower who already read the older posts don't have to see in a long snake on their dashboards but anyone who hadn't read older updates could do so by clicking the "read more."

Except I still prefer the workaround because it keeps all my status updates in one post instead of having to track down multiple posts to remind me of reading status when writing a review. I just prefer one post with a bookcover and all the reading status texts to dozens of screens of search results for the book.

Booklikes adjusted saying "has read 5 of 100." for 5% reading status per a member request but that now bugs me because leaves off the percent sign and now says "has read 5." Not so much on regular computers but on touchscreens to edit and add the percent sign gets cranky (faster for me to just edit and spell out percent).

Not that i'm complaining. They've added a much requested feature. I just think that like groups the feature needs a little tweaking. And I still get giddy at how responsive booklikes is to members and the very idea that new features or member requested changes happen every Thursday.

Has anyone turned sync with goodreads back in to know if the status updates on booklikes create reading progress updates on goodreads?

I'm still getting used to the new progress updates feature, but I think I do like the old way better. Sometimes I don't really have much new to say after updating several times while I'm reading, so it's convenient for my progress updates to just serve as the review. I never used the synch feature, I just export/upload the csv from GR to BL. It's kind of a pain, though.

Randolph wrote: "The thing I like about bl reading progress is it lets you enter the finished page count yourself. The page counts for books in gr are usually incorrect for a particular edition and nobody ever see..."

Librarians care to fix the page numbers for an edition--just post over in librarian's group (but don't expect them to change number of pages in a non-fixed page format ebook every time you change the font on your ereader).