Maintenance Monday

[calico_reaction]

To Review or Not to Review?

Today's topic is a little different: Dreams & Speculation, formerly known as Book Love Affair, asked me if I'd be willing to write a Monday Coming Attraction during the month of May, as she was going to be covered up with non-book related activities. I was happy to help out, so instead of rambling here about some random

Comments

[jawastew]

If I know you've read a particular book, but don't remember when, I'll just look for the author tag and search through those posts. :)

[calico_reaction]

It's kind of scary, too! :) What's killed me was reading short story mags a while back which usually has 6-8 in it that I'll never read again. Same goes for short story anthologies!

[shanra]

It is a massive tag list. If it's the size in the sidebar that's making you ask and you don't want to change much, I'd suggest setting a limit on the tags that get shown and see if that helps. I think it's long enough that people won't complain about about the extra click and page

[calico_reaction]

Thanks for your suggestions! Definitely something to give more thought to, as I've considered doing with authors what I've done with "awards" and "publisher" and "ratings". I'll be thinking hard on this one.

What's killed me with authors was reading short story mags a while back which usually has 6-8 in it that I'll never read again. Same goes for short story anthologies!

[shanra]

If you did that, I think it'd really help the people who don't use the author tags because that'd be a whole 'author' parent they could just scroll past/skip instead of having to skim through all the names to find something that's not a name.

It's tough to balance out the usability, though. LJ's not really suited for it. All the tags you're using are going to be valuable for someone at some point. And the poll certainly suggests that the tags people use the most are the ones that are causing the size issue. Maybe make a follow-up post asking people how and why they use the author names for tags? That might be useful to know in working out what to do with them.

I used to list every single author for an anthology in my masterlist. Drove me batty. It makes the entire list incredibly unwieldy. (Especially when there aren't too many other things on the list. You just keep seeing the same title over and over and over

[calico_reaction]

I've thought about that, removing authors from mags and anthologies, but the downside to that is I like having access to random names to see if I've read them before if said random names have a book published. If I don't have those tags, then I don't have an easy way to discover those obscure names that I read, you know?

It's definitely worth pondering over. :) Grouping will help though.

[calico_reaction]

Again, there's no need to apologize! It's all good!

I loved the look of the old layout. But the things that bugged me were the very narrow middle column and the fact I couldn't darken the text, which quite a few people had trouble with. :-/

Thanks for adding the giveaway! That's very helpful. :)

[calico_reaction]

I found a way to make this a three-column format. I'm going to see how it works. :)

[earthguardian]

With the tags, I use the genre since that's how I look for books in general. I just head over to a section in the bookstore and look through the titles.

Also: like the new lay out.

[calico_reaction]

Thanks!