Christine; 09.26.2021
After I posted, it occurred to me that it might be helpful for us to identify who is posting in the post title or using a byline. I added my avatar image to the top so it looks sort of like the old BL posts, doesn’t it? Without identifying the author in the title, it’s a mystery until you get to the bottom!
Once Themis arrives, I’m interested in getting an understanding of what the “project” function can do for us.
It also occurs to me that this format might work really well for buddy reads – much more similar to the old BL feed. If anyone wants to give that a try, let me know and we can see how it works (maybe with one of the Appointment with Agatha October books). I’m read to start Death at the Dolphin anytime. My library hold came through.
I’m also wondering about the Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin. Do I need to create a form to use it, or have we not made it available on this site? I am going to post a book post today. MBD, I think it is worth having available if we can get it for free. If we decide to go this direction, depending on costs, I might also be willing to pay for it.
Which also brings me to financial questions. Is it possible to Venmo you money from the US if we do decide to go this direction? I don’t want you to end up financially on the hook for anything more than nominal expenses. I think we could reasonably expect users to contribute some relatively small amount in order to use whatever we come up with. Mike Finn had some ideas about even creating a non-profit to use to finance it.
Let’s plan to play with this until at least the end of October. I think we’ll have a good idea at that point where the limitations are.
I would also like to bring Wanda in, if no one objects. She uses blogger, and I think it would be good to get some perspective from her on how the two platforms differ. She also posts quite a bit on her blog, and it would be easy for her to cross-post here and see how she likes it. Plus, not gonna lie, I love her food posts!
That’s all for this morning…
Posts without images are boring, so here’s a pic of Gus with his face in the water!
Adorable picture of Gus!
I am fine with Wanda joining us.
I also have a blogger, but I don’t use it.
I like the idea of identifying ourselves at the beginning of the posts, and the avatar at the beginning of the posts, too.
Starting at the top:
I like the avatar at the top of the post thing too; I wonder if there’s a way to accomplish that easily. I know we can set a header image for each post, but having to do that every time seems like a ‘too hard’ step. I’ll do some research and see what I can find.
Do you mean trying out the Projects part for buddy reads, or just this WP format overall being good for buddy reads? Either way, I’d be happy to try out a buddy read – there’s a “status” format for posts I just noticed yesterday and I’m intrigued about, but Ultimate Book Blogger also offers something, which I’ll get to in a second. But I’m not familiar with Death at the Dolphin – I’m assuming it has another title?
I’m fine with Wanda coming in too; I think there’s going to have to be an FAQ on whatever site we end up using, and having people here who are not at all familiar with WP will help give us a sense of how hard this might be for others.
The Ultimate Book Blogger plug-in is not free. It’s $35 a year, if you want on-going updates and support. Otherwise it’s just a one-time 35 dollars. I think it will be worth that expense; it won’t actually build a book database for us, but it will allow us to post covers and book information linked to either Google or GR, and it will archive our reviews, and offers spoiler tags, and I think it has the yearly reading challenge widget? I use the plug in but not as often as I use her Book Database – it actually builds a database, but I have to manually add the books each time which is probably not going to be popular with the other users.
I’m not familiar with Venmo, but I do have a PayPal account that accepts payment from where-ever. So far, I’m not incurring any extra expenses, as everything we’re doing is already covered under my annual fee for the hosting. If we want to buy the UBB plug in, I’m happy to do that, and I even had an idea for next year, if we go forward with a site like this, to offer actual printed bingo cards to everybody. Originally I was thinking we’d do them for cost + shipping, because I’m not looking at making money off my friends, but perhaps a tiny profit, say, $1 added to the cost of each card, would offset the cost of domain fees and plug-in fees. It’s a very rough idea, so it might not be a good one.
I’ll fiddle around with the navigation – I think I know what you are trying to accomplish, though I could be way off the mark. Are you looking for a menu that expands when you click on it?
Let me know if you’d like to try out the UBB plug in and I’ll get it installed.
Also – Gus is adorable! – and obviously good at holding his breath. 😀
I like the menu that expands when you click it, but that’s even more tech than what I was trying to get it to do. I just wanted to declutter the main menu, and maybe use it for things that are relevant to all users, as opposed to individual users (for example, a page for bingo rules, a page for the full list of categories, etc).
If you look at my blog, you can sort of see how I use menus. My top menu is my primary active projects menu. My sidebar has 3 separate navigation menus – “Bookish Organization,” “Halloween Bingo Archive,” and “Year by Year Reading Record.”
So, what I was thinking is that we could set up a navigation menu for this year’s individual Halloween Bingo pages, and then eventually we would move that menu down to the bottom of the sidebar and set up a new one, with new individual pages, each year, if that makes sense?
Ah, ok, now I get what you’re talking about. Let me see if I can work out how to do that. I might have to put on the big girl panties and use widgets. 🙂
I DID IT! Woot!
It’s finicky, and I had to use widgets, but it worked. The trick is to create the new menu in menus, but DON’T check a placement tick box. Add items to the new menu from this area too. THEN create a navigation menu widget, name it, and choose the menu you want to use.
Et voila! I had to use the Delete Cache command at the very top tool bar on my screen to get it to appear. And I added a separator to make it look a little more tidy.
I think it looks great! When I get around to it, I’m going to set up some additional bingo management pages and see how they look.
Hey, look at that. When I went into edit mode, it automatically added the avatar & author, MBD.
Except, weird. It doesn’t show up on the main feed, just when I click on the post? What’s up with that?
Also weird – when you click on my category, it puts my avatar off to the side with my name below it, but the text is all mashed up and sort of unreadable.
In order to get it to show up on the feed you have to use that shortcut thing the [ ] bit, which I put in my original post and now can’t remember.
If you go to user -> profile, I think you can play around with individual settings too, so you can make it look different.
Arg – the category avatar is one I thought I’d turned off precisely because it looked like that on the posts. I must have left something ‘on’ in the settings.
Do we want to stick with this, or should I dump it and try another one, or just say f*ck it and say we’re doing it manually?
I think we should do it manually. It would be pretty easy to setup some text to cut and paste into the top of each post.
I agree – I’ll disable it now and get rid of it.