Christine; 09.29.2021
I’ve added a few thoughts to some of the comments, and I have a question for MBD.
First, I really like Mike’s table set up for the space images & text descriptions. I’m wondering (if we go this direction) if it would be possible to add a link to the text that would take readers to a separate booklist page, where we could embed a table, sorted by author last name, with the booklists that we have compiled on BL/GR. I don’t think that they need to be linkable because that would take a tremendous amount of work.
Second, we’ve been discussing the book database versus the Ultimate Book Blogger plugin. I am only familiar with the UBB plug-in – I used it on an old blog that was hosted by Ashley, who developed the plug in. It basically provides a format for posting book reviews – you enter the information about the book, including cover image, link to GR page, plot summary from GR, publication date, etc. It creates a very attractive post, and includes a star rating function. It’s nice.
I know nothing at all about the book database, though. Maybe MBD could provide us with a sort of a compare and contrast of the features of both. She uses the book database for her site. I find the idea of building our own book database intriguing, especially if we end up sort of wholesale moving the group over here for all purposes, including but not limited to Halloween Bingo.
Finally, I think that I like my byline better without the block quote – this on is just a thumbnail of my avatar (which I cropped into a round shape on picmonkey) and the name/date italicized and bolded.
This has been great fun so far.
At the moment, my favourite book database is LibraryThing. We could link to their book descriptions and reviews.
We could set up a Halloween Bingo Library on LibraryThing and offer it to people either by links to LibraryThing or by using TinyCat. We can use the Squares as tags on LibraryThing to make them searchable.
I think you should be able to use this link to access my TinyCat to see what I mean.
https://www.librarycat.org/lib/MikeFinnFiction
I have a Tiny Cat library, but I haven’t used it much!
I was rummaging around on the internet, as one does, and I searched for Ashley’s book database info. It’s a very cool idea. Basically, the site users would enter their books into the database, and over time, we would build our own database that reflects what we have read. You can also add taxonomies to the database, and we could use the HB categories as one taxonomy. It might then be possible to set up a page with a shortcode that displays all of the books that have the category taxonomy – maybe MBD can give us a clue how it is working?
In addition, I have an LT membership and I would guess that most of us do. If we wanted to divorce from GR completely, that would be a possibility.
I think having the book lists for each square is very doable. Linking might be something we do over the long haul, or not. And I think using a site light LibraryThing is an excellent option, no matter which way we go with the plug-ins.
As for the comparison – Ashley has a table that she’s done comparing the features of the two plug-ins; I’ll create a separate post here in a moment that includes that table, as well as my (limited) thoughts about using the two. I primarily use Book Database for Murder by Death, (if you want to see the layout of the reviews with that plugin, they’re on all my reviews at https://murderedbydeath.com), so my depth of knowledge about UBB is not the same as Book Database.
I think, if this site took off for more than just a single bingo game each year, the Book Database might be worth further discussion. It’s not without its irritations, which on some days feel more numerous than others, but it’s far and away the best plug-in (only) I’ve found.
I get that post together in a moment.