MbD’s state of mind: Still hate GoodReads, WordPress not far behind

TTthhhppphhttt. How’s that for a state of mind?

Life has been busy – mostly not in any enjoyable way; we’re still covid free here but other factors of real life have kept us hopping, forcing me to pretty much check out of all my online activities save the bare minimum.  The bare minimum has been logging my books and in quiet moments at work, building up my super-spreadsheet of All The Books and Their Reviews.  I’ve also been working on some things at the new beta site, Bookhype.com (more on that in a different post).

I’m trying with the blog, I really am.  But it’s a pain in the ass.  Even with the classic editor, or whatever the hell they call it, I can’t just whip off a post.  If it’s about books, I have to make sure the book data is entered, I have to chase down the cover, I have to link 800 things and click on several pages.  Pain. in. the. ass.  And trying to follow comments and other people’s posts is damn near impossible – the WordPress app only notifies me about random comments and shows me only about, I suspect, a third of the posts of those I’m following.

I’ve also been trying with GoodReads groups, but that’s working even less well.  Too many threads to read and keep up with; my soul shrivels every time I open the groups and see all the unread messages.  And I hate the site anyway.

All of which to say, while I’m still not going to give up on this blog, I’m sticking with BookLikes.  Pressing performance issues aside (which haven’t been that bad for me the last several weeks), the site is perfectly designed for me as a reader and book tracker.  I’ll safeguard my data so I don’t get left in the lurch if things finally go belly up, but until then, I’m hanging on.

6 thoughts on “MbD’s state of mind: Still hate GoodReads, WordPress not far behind”

  1. I hope RL is going to treat both of you more kindly soon at last! Or ALL of you of course … I miss hearing from all the family, however many legs or wings they may have.

    Unfortunately, BL is pretty unusable for me at this point. Unlike others I can at least still log in (and am not personally beset by spammers), but the DB only shows me the top 2 posts and the stops to load. (Last night, one of the top 2 posts happened to be yours.) Even when it was still loading better, the place felt more or less like a ghost town, though. The only thing that loads more or less OK are my own posts — in blog mode — which I use to build my backup on WP. But I have to go by the “original post“ link at the bottom of the WP version — search, too, is now limited to some 5 or so results, both in blog and in DB mode. It‘s both frustrating and infuriating … a real shame.

    Tim‘s thread on LT hasn‘t been updated for a few weeks now (which still doesn‘t stop me from checking daily) … I take it if he had definite news either way he‘d let us know, so for the moment I‘m willing to assume things are still in some sort of suspension (though I hesitate to call it balance).

    Here‘s hoping for a quieter final 2 months of the year — we can all use it — and for a better start into 2021! Life definitely needs a reset button.

    Oh, and I‘m going to steal that cat meme.

    Sunny and Charlie send their love! 🐯🐾❤️

    1. I check the LT thread daily too, and gah! I can only hope.

      I’m not sure why BL has been ok for me – it loads pretty well everywhere except the dashboard does limit the number of posts when it first loads. But then I click Load more a few times and eventually it loads the rest. My shelves and the book pages have been surprisingly spry as of late, which has been a help as I make sure my shelves at BookHype match up to my books at BL.

      1. What you’re describing about the BL dash is the way it used to behave for me, too, until recently — unfortunately, no longer. 🙁

        I think unless Tim / Librarything saves it, it’s going to die — or drown in spam.

  2. Sorry to hear that RL has been so tough.

    And I am not surprised to hear about the WP app issues. WP really seems to be set on monetizing everything and driving people towards that. So buy a website from them or get out of town, that seems to sum up their attitude, even towards the free wordpress people.

    I’ve seen you being busy as a beaver on bookhype, so I’ll be looking forward to your post on it.

    1. But the thing that’s irritating me about WP is that I AM using the paid site (although I don’t pay for it directly from WP) and I STILL can’t get things to work consistently. When I follow someone, I check to be notified of comments, etc. But it’s only ever worked on your account. Everybody else I follow, if I want to follow a conversation, I have to click “follow this conversation” on EVERY post. Insane.

      My BookHype post wasn’t as destailed as I intended; it would have gone on forever if it were, but hopefully I covered some highlights.

      1. I’m pretty sure you are using the DOT ORG stuff. That is a completely separate entity from DOT COM.

        And it causes no end of confusion all over the place. It is a really bad business practice as far as I’m concerned.

        It is also why I’ll never strike out on my own, as I stated when you first started out. Dotorg and dotcom are supposed to play nice together, but from what I’ve seen, that’s just not the reality.

        That is so weird that you can only get notifications from my site. Have you ever checked out some of the differences between my site and others? Or is it just not worth it to you? At some point, you just have to shrug and live with it, or go some place else.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.