My fourth week of Halloween Bingo felt very relaxed. I finished three books and enjoyed all of them.
.’World Of Trouble’ was the last book in a trilogy about the end of the world that I’ve been putting off reading, partly because I thought it might be too sad. It was sad but not in a maudlin way. The ending was beautiful and perfect. I’m very glad I finally read this one.
‘Burn Bright’ was my fifth visit with Anna and Charles and was the best book in the series so far. I picked it for my Raven square partly because it gave me a potential bingo and partly because I was in the mood for more Patricia Briggs.
I enjoyed learning about the Wildings, werewolves too broken to live with the pack and too dangerous to live with humans. The central mystery was good and the action was compelling. As usual though, what I enjoyed most was getting to know the characters better.
‘Shadowlands’ was a last minute decision. I wanted something light and quick to fill my Sunday and the Trick Or Treat square offered me another potential bingo.
I’d never read Meg Cabot before. She delivered a light, entertaining Young Adult tale about a teenager who can talk to the dead. Most of the mileage came from our heroine’s move to Carmel from NYC but there was also a baddy worthy of a Buffy Season 1 episode. It was a pleasant way to spend five hours.
So this is my current Halloween Bingo Library:
The game is 44% through at this point and I’ve read half of my books. I’m hoping to get a bingo this week. So far I have:
- eight squares read and called
- three squares called but not read
- six squares read but not called.
I posted this to see what a post I’ve run on my Halloween Bingo Blog would look like here.
The only difference in format that I found was on images. I started by pasting in the content from my blog. It looked the same in the editor but when I went to preview, the book images became full-size rather than thumbnail. I could have fixed it by playing with the image size manually but the editor didn’t give me a ‘click on thumbnail’ option. So I imported the images and resized them in the normal way.
I was surprised that images that I copied into the post didn’t show up in the media library.
I found that I couldn’t select an image in my post as the Featured Image unless it was in the Media Library first.
On my blog, I select a Featured Image. On my main blog, this determines the image that will show up on the landing page as ‘the’ image for the post. It also determines what image appears on Twitter. I couldn’t find a way of repeating the landing page on my HB blog, so the featured image is only useful in that it shows up on the post list. It also gives this strange thing where the featured image sits at the top of the post in addition to the image already in the post.
Anyway, this raised some questions for me:
Do we recommend the use of featured image? Do we / can we set up the template so that the featured image is just the first image in the post? Can we make a featured image from a pasted in image.
It made me think about categories and tagging.
I imagine that people can add any tag they want. I was often amused at some of the tags people used. It was part of how they expressed their option on the book.
I think that it would be helpful to have a standard set of categories either as mandatory or as thought starters.
For example, we could load each square as a category so that posts are searchable and can be displayed by squares.
It would be possible to build a page for the chosen categories but this takes some maintenance. I think it would be easier to set up a menu by category on the main page. When you click on a category on the menu, a list of all the posts in the category come up, most recent first. So I could see everything posted about ‘Dem Bones’ if the poster clicked the category.
If we do set up a feed, is it the whole post, as it was on BL or is it the beginning of the post as it is on WP Reader?
Do we allow re-posting as we did on BL. It’s not showing up as an option at the moment.
What rules do we have on visibility. Will the site be searchable by googleP Can something posted here be reposted to your own blog, allowing people who read your blog to find their way here? Can we seen a post from here to Twitter or FB or other social media platform.
My inclination is to restrict visibility. What people post on their own blog is up to them but the content of this site should only be visible to members and should be invisible to search engines.
Sorry to deluge you all with questions. We don’t need to answer them all now. I just wanted to capture my thoughts to come hack to later.
I just found out two things:
1.
I was wrong about us not having a feed. I just hadn’t scrolled down the HOME page to get to the posts. There’s a slap your own forehead in wonder at your stupidity moment if ever there was one.
Replying to your last comment first: whew – I was wondering what you were seeing, but don’t sweat editing it (although you can at the moment, by going to the Site Admin and clicking on the comments page, but that will likely change if we decide to make a WP site official). Everybody has a head-slapping moment, or in my case, 10 or 11 at least once a day. 🙂
As to the the first comment, I’ll try to reply to what I can in order:
Pasting posts/images: I have noticed that pasting content blows away the image sizes set in the original content. I always have to resize my images after pasting, but you can click on the image to get the corner handles that allow you to click and drag to resize. Or you can click edit and do it manually. Occasionally I have to change the alignment back too.
Images that are copied from WP will be copied as html, though it won’t look that way, and as I type this, might explain the image sizing (I think WP resizes images without using html width/height scripting). So when you paste content, you’re linking to the image on your original site. It’s how I was able to copy over my HB card to this site without having to upload a gazillion images. You can see this in action on the classic editor by clicking on the ‘text’ tab.
I’ve used the featured image very rarely, (mostly only for HB posts on my blog), and always use images I’ve uploaded to my media library, so I can’t really expand on this point. I do know that if you use an image from your post as the featured image, it will repeat on the feed – I learned that the first time I tried using FI. Now I choose a different image for FI, seperate from the images I use in the post.
As to people pasting content from their posts, I think we’d need feedback from the rest of the committee as to how they envisage using this site. I’d guess they’ll all be for pasting content if they have other web sites. Since I’m still bring random stuff over to my blog from BL, I have a scraper plug-in, but I don’t think that’s any easier than copy/pasting when it’s just one post at a time. Other than having to fix my image sizes, I’ve never had an issue with copy/pasting, although I use the classic editor – block editor might offer additional problems.
I have no opinion on use of the Featured Image other than we should probably let people know if they use an image already in their posts, it’ll repeat. I rarely use one myself, unless I’m posting a thematic series of posts (like my HB posts on my other blog).
Categories: now that could be a sticker issue. Christine set up categories for each username, and there’s a menu at the left with our categories listed, allowing a ‘master post page’ for each of us. That menu is coded to display ALL categories that have posts assigned to them. While I really like using categories to expand our options with squares, I think it’s going to cause the menu to explode to an unwieldy degree. I’m already worried about what 49 categories for users will look like (though at least it appears they’re automatically alphabetized).
We could accomplish the same thing with tags, I think, though we’d still be looking at a potentially unwieldy menu.
Currently, I have all reposting/pinging turned off as well as every setting allowing search engine indexing. Ditto with social media linking. This is a test site, and my personal domain, so I don’t want it to be found by anyone other than us. I’m not dead against these features, if we eventually go live with this on a dedicated domain, but my personal preference on my own blog is not to allow any of it; I don’t like people all that much (this community excepted) and would rather not be found. 🙂
I think I covered everything I know anything about, but if I missed anything let me know. And I’m certain the others will have views and feedback other than mine.
I love the way that this looks!
When it comes to categories, I do think that we are better off limiting categories to provide each member their own “portfolio” and if we add a lot of other categories, it’s going to get too muddled.
If we end up with a site that is more long term than the games, I think it potentially make sense to add a few additional themed categories – such as Halloween Bingo; Twenty-Four Tasks & maybe Buddy Reads, with the appropriate year as part of the category name. That way anyone who wants to just see posts that are HB 2021 related can click on that category to get a limited feed.
When it comes to tags, I’m open to more extensive use. We could give each bingo space its own tag, we could do genre tags, etc. It probably does make some sense to set up a tag universe and ask people to commit to using just those tags so we don’t end up with a bunch of tags that are just slightly different.