So I’m slowly getting the hang of this WordPress thing; coming from an html/css background, I still find it cumbersome, but not so much that I’m willing to hand-script all my posts and pages. Old BookLikes friends like Bookstooge have helped me iron out a few kinks; likely there are still a couple dozen left waiting to be figured out. But I’m slowly starting to move reviews over; a few years ago I did a site scrape of my BL site, and I still have all those files. I’m mentally gearing up to write some filtering scripts that will extract the reviews from them and put them in a .csv file, so I can mass upload here. It will be a staggering amount of work to clean them up, but at least I won’t lose them should BookLikes turn itself off.
Luckily, with Melbourne in Stage 4 lockdown, I have time to concentrate on this and other database driven projects. I’ve been slowly uploading all 22k of my photos to SmugMug, a photo site I’ve been a member for for years, but never took the time to really use. I’ve also been creating life lists on iNaturalist; this is the next step from my original plan to just mark how many birds I’ve seen since moving to Australia, something that’s become a much more engrossing hobby than I’d originally anticipated (see below).
I’ve also bought some books lately – for the first time since February. Some of you know MT’s birthday present to me this year was 50 collectible books of my choosing; that, for obvious reasons, has been put on hold, and I’ve not felt it wise to buy regular books either (not to mention the Aussie dollar is worth only slightly more than the used gum on the sidewalk, making everything so much more expensive). My book haul includes:
I also got The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman, which I’m currently reading, and Smoke Bitten by Patricia Briggs, which I’ve just recently finished. At least two of those new books should be useable for Halloween Book Bingo 2020: The Sun Down Motel, and maybe, depending on the squares I get, The Constant Rabbit and/or Miss Benson’s Beetle. Those are iffy.
As I mentioned above, Melbourne is in stage 4 lockdowns which means we can’t leave the house for anything except essential shopping within a 5k radius of our house, with a curfew imposed after 8pm. But just before we clamped down, it was bright, sunny and warm for a few days and MT and I got out to the parks to do some hiking (with masks). It was 3 good days that will have to last me the next 6 weeks. I didn’t see any new-to-me birds, but I got some personal best shots of a few:
Sorry for the lost post; I’ve only got so much patience for the WP learning curve so I’m packing it all in!
Now that’s a serious lockdown. I wish we’d had that here in the UK. Maybe we wouldn’t be getting 1,000 new cases a day and we wouldn’t have gotten to the point where having 100 or less deaths a day is seen as having defeated the disease.
I love your book selection. If I weren’t wading through my own TBR, I’d be buying some of those, especially ‘Miss Benson’s Beetle’.
Your shots of birds are wonderful. I’ve only become aware of birds in the past few months as I’ve been spending my time in my garden. Our birds are less spectacular but I’ve been surprised at how many species there are: Blackbirds, Robins, Wood Pigeon, Magpies, Wrens, Finches and Gulls. They’re fun to watch and I’m finally starting to be able to identify them by their calls.
Thanks Mike. It all started as, if you’ll pardon the pun, a bit of a lark. When I moved here I was absolutely entranced by the idea that Sulphur-crested Cockatoos are almost more common than pigeons here (not really, but close enough). Then I stared seeing the parrots and I just thought ‘I should keep a quick list of the birds I’ve seen while I’m here’ – because I didn’t want to someday move home (if I do) and not say I’d seen this country. My husband found a list of birds of Victoria, and I just started checking them off as I came acros them, and it has evolved into this whole project since then, involving me dragging him to parks and shooting about 900 photos, hoping there will be one decent shot in the bunch. It’s been fun, and I realise now how many places I’ve been without ever really ‘seeing’ them. And I’ve seen birds and animals that are once-in-a-lifetime sights for non-Aussies. It’s been a lot of fun. 🙂
Glad you didn’t lose everything from booklikes. I pretty much gave up on getting any info, except for just a couple of posts that I really liked and were worth the copy/paste effort.
And thanks for putting up with me bugging you about comments and stuff. I know that someone coming onto your site and “making demands” can be tiresome, so I’m glad this has worked out so far.
I have a bad feeling the notifications thing just isn’t ever going to work. But that is one prediction I would LOVE to be wrong about 😀
Very nice pictures!
Glad you were able to salvage at least some from BookLikes. I had Booklikes upload my posts to wordpress for years (no clue why I started it, but here we are), and while formatting is awful on every single one of them – at least most of the post are conserved.
Block editor definitely takes some getting used to. What for me was really useful was I discovered I could make my own blocks, for example the layout I want for my reviews, and then I can load it for each review and just change the book details. Saves a lot of time.
Thanks URLPhantomhive!
I’ve been working on my great import project today, and I’ve managed, with a little finagling, to import everything up to 2016 into this site and I’ve just finished a fresh scrape of my booklikes site, so I should be able to get the rest over in the next few days. Of course, it’ll all sit in ‘drafts’ for who knows how long as I slowly go through and clean them all up and reassociate them with covers, etc. But at least I have them all now.
I did not know you could make your own blocks! That is a plus and one that I’d find helpful for some of the posts I do (like the bingo games, etc.) Thanks for that tip!
No problem. If you are ever stuck with them, let me know and I’ll try to help 😉
I hated blocks when WP introduced them but after spending A LOT of time salvaging posts and content from BL, I’ve come to love blocks.
The biggest revelation to me was that it is now is dead simple to embed book covers using the image location on LT, which means that a) I get the edition I want and b) I don’t have to save the image anywhere myself.
I’m still learning WP, too, but so far I really like it.
Btw, the bird pictures are gorgeous!
Thanks. 😀
I used blocks in this post, actually, for the bird images especially, as I wanted that collage look, which I think it easier on readers when you have a lot of photos. It wasn’t bad for that, but I think my biggest hurdle is I think I should be able to drag and resize the blocks themselves, and I can’t (as far as I know) so I’m stuck with whatever pre-shaped stuff is in the library – until I learn to make my own, but even then I can’t rearrage them as much as I’d like to. I don’t think.
I may change my mind once I have to re-do all my old posts, though I wanted the book covers stored here b/c I have the book database here, so I’m still looking at a lot of self-inflicted work. :p Though I am investigating a way to mass import the covers, so maybe it won’t be too diabolical.
I loved these photos!!! Beautiful!
My husband and I have been doing a LOT of hiking during our lock down.
WordPress is a beast. I just learned a bunch of tricks from these comments though! 🙂
Thanks! I miss the hiking, expecially as the weather starts to slowly improve. But I got a few really good ones in before lockdown, and I’ve been making a list for when the lockdown is lifted. 😀