Misty

Dashboard is a place where many book-likes things happen. You see updates from blogs you follow, bookshelf news, reviews, quotes, pictures. Now you can switch between 8 views of your Dash and decide which activities see first.

Your Dashbord has just received several views which present different activities of your Followings. You can switch between them and keep up to date with reviews and bookshelf updates or quickly find inspirational quotes and pics.

We’ve divided Dashboard into eight sections:

- Reviews - all texts marked as a review;

- Text - all published texts;

- Photo - published Photo Posts;

- Quote - published Quote Posts;

- URL - published URL Posts;

- Video - published Video Posts;

- Activity - bookshelf updates and other activity.

Once you select a given view, your Dash will present content from selected section. You can also choose All to see updates from all sections gathered in one place. 

Tag search box works in every view so it will be easy to find e.g.: a given title in a Reviews Dash view. 

Tips

To make your Reading Challenge visible on your other webpages go to Goodies/Widgets page, get the code and add it to your webpage's HTML. 

To make Reading Challenge visible on your BookLikes webpage (yourusername.booklikes.com) go to Goodies/Widgets page, get the code and add it in  Widget Area spot in Customization Tab.

You can place more than one widget code in Widget Area, just paste the codes one under each other. 

Future hint: We do plan some updates for the challenge, e.g. a spot presenting books in a given challenge.

Pic source: via

When it's not about reading, it's about writing. Discover author's know-how in pics, quotes and tips. Click image or link below to go to blog post.

On writing process:

 via Crickhollow Books - Reading Ideas from an Indie Perspective

via Derrolyn Anderson

Writer's woes - oh, yeah via Olga Godim

A little while back on BookLikes, I promised to do something of a series of posts on my writing process and methods which I use to influence/enhance that process as I move along.  This series is going to be equal parts reflection on my part and instruction, but I'll try to break it up into digestible sections so if there's a section you guys want to skip to or is more relevant to you, you can do so.  But if you read it in any capacity, I salute you. - via Rose's Jumping Into Writing #1: Putting the Pen to the Page

Writing tips:

#1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. Read Margaret Atwood’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction via A Libra's Libros 

via HUNGER FOR KNOWLEDGE

Guidelines for writers via POCKET FULL OF MERMAIDS

On Writing via Derrolyn Anderson

Writer's fears:

Book to Screen via Themis-Athena's Garden of Books

Short Story via Dilettante

Non-writing writer via Dilettante

On writer's life:

 via Bookloving writer

 How to survive relationship with a writer via Bookloving author and publisher

 via HUNGER FOR KNOWLEDGE

good advice via Derrolyn Anderson

via Rayne Hall, Fantasy and Horror Author

Our pinch of bookshelf settings is getting bigger and bigger. Following your requests we've added possibility of choosing default shelf view and easy way of taking books off the selected shelf.

Now you can decide what view should be a default view of your Shelf page: Shelf with covers or Table view. You can choose the view on Shelf Settings Page (click settings icon next to a book count on your Shelf page).

You can also take books off a particular status or shelf. This option will not delete books from your Shelf page, it will only take selected books off a given status or shelf.

To take books off a shelf, go to table view, choose one status or one shelf and select books(s) in the table view. Then click Take book(s) off the selected shelf on the top of the table. Selected books will be taken off a chosen shelf. They will stay on your Shelf Page with updated shelves and statuses.

Have a look at the example:

Here's what's going to happen: selected books will be taken off "Oscar book adaptations" shelf. The books will stay on Shelf Page but will not be shelved on "Oscar book adaptations" shelf anymore. New Take off the shelf option works only for one shelf or one status selected. 

We're celebrating Fat Thursday today, so ... we're forgetting about diet and eating donuts while reading. Join us :-) 

And here are several donuts books: 

Fantastic illustrations! Love donuts? So does Sam

My Never Ending List: Poor Sam.  He had it all: a nice home, friends and family but he wanted more, lots more, he actual wants millions of donuts.  What does Sam do?  He hops on his tricycle and goes to the city to find them. 

Homer Price - Robert McCloskey  Six episodes in the life of Homer Price including one in which he and his pet skunk capture four bandits and another about a donut machine on the rampage with awesome illustrations. 

The Case of the Missing Donut

pamelaokramer: Picture book about honesty and responsibility. But the kids will think it's about irresistible donuts and a young "sheriff" and his deputy (dog) who can't resist them.

THE DONUT CHEF by Bob Staake

Karin's Book Nook: This 2008 picture book is being re-released. If you missed it the first time around you definitely should check it out. The whole thing is so colorful. Staake's illustrations are very interesting and I love all the various people. This is a great story on many levels, but the message that sometimes less is more definitely seems to be the main focus. This one is also good for looking at competition. 

"Show me your shelf and I'll tell you who you are". We've prepared a special place for your Shelf Settings to make your book space better organized. Your virtual bookshelf has just received new page with set up options. We have big plans for shelf options (old and new) and this is the first step.

The entrance to new shelf settings spot is on your Shelf Page, just click settings icon next to your book count. 

New bookshelf settings page presents all possible bookshelf options. 

1. You can add new and remove thematic shelves. 

2. You can re-name existing thematic shelves.

3. You can decide which book sort option should be default: title, author, ratings, read date, add date. 

4. You can choose shelf sorting: alphabetical or manual. If you have chosen manual sorting, you can choose position for each thematic bookshelf - type position numbers or drag shelves. The position options are available only when you select manual sorting. 

5. You can create new statuses such as Re-read, DNF. They will appear next to Read, Planning to read, Currently reading on your Shelf Page. 

6. You can change thematic shelf into status and vice-versa. 

Remember to save each change to make shelf updates. 

Updates

If you wish to change your blog design take part in Parajunkee's BookLikes Blog Design Giveaway and win custom design for your page.

Or choose new free template called Bundled designed by Baelkina from UNGH... ARRR... BOOKS! Read more about the theme and possible options of customization here: BUNDLED (NEW BOOKLIKES THEME). 

Template is available in BookLikes Theme Store (Settings/Blog -> Customize -> Themes).

pic source: via

Rating stars are like book recommendations and they are now visible on your Dashboard! This means it will be easier to pick your next book to read.

And it’s just the first step in new Dashboard look :)

Updates

- You can now add clickable links in comments under the blog posts. Please remember that it is you, who is responsible for keeping the comment under your blog posts safe and sound.

- Posts in discussion rooms received +1/-1 markers. Now you can show appreciation to your fellow interlocutors by clicking plus one next to their posts in groups.

Rating stars are like book recommendations and they are now visible on your Dashboard! This means it will be easier to pick your next book to read.

Rating stars will help you in choosing the next read and filling up planning to read shelf :) Books marked as read with rating stars will be shown on your Dash the moment when your Followings mark them as Read and label with rating stars.

And it’s just the first step in new Dashboard look :)

Updates

- You can now add clickable links in comments under the blog posts. Please remember that it is you, who is responsible for keeping the comment under your blog posts safe and sound.

- Posts in discussion rooms received +1/-1 markers. Now you can show appreciation to your fellow interlocutors by clicking plus one next to their posts in groups.

Building or moving your shelves can be tricky, especially if your collection is quite big. But we have the solution, everything is possible on virtual bookshelf. From now on your can easily organize and move your shelves on BookLikes.  

You can move thematic shelves and put them in your own order, e.g. alphabetic, by book count, literary genres, authors, years, challenges...

Here's how: when you hover over the shelf name you'll see black arrows on the left. Click, hold and drag the shelf up or down to the desirable position. 

New shelves will be added on the top of your thematic shelves list, then you can change their position. 

So what are your shelf arrangement ideas? 

Tips

To find friends on BookLikes, connect your social media in Settings and use find friends option is Friend's Tab. You can also invite your friends - just paste friend's e-mail address in invite box and click Invite. You have 10 invitations but if you need more, just let us know :)

pic source: via

To make arranging and organizing books on your Shelf more convenient, we've added a separate book search box in your table view. And to make your blogs look prettier, new design themes are available in BookLikes Theme Store. There's also a tiny improvement of great value in writing box. 

Search Books In Table View

Let's take a look at your Shelves and new search box first. Go to table view and type book title, part of the title or author's name in new search spot. The table view will present you only the book(s) that match the title phrase/author's name. It will help you find a specific book entry and change shelf it is put on, add rating stars or update reading status in a couple of seconds.

Pimp Your Blog

We have more good news. You can find two new templates in BookLikes Theme Store. Both of them were prepared by Parajunkee (Go girl!). You can pimp your blog in Customization Tab (entrance Settings/Blog) and in BookLikes Theme Store where you can find these two brand new themes:

  Custom Colours - free

Fantasy Reader - $9.00

 Continue Writing After Saving

There's also something new in writing box. Now you can easily go back to edit view after Saving as draft or Publishing a post. It's useful if you're working on a longer text or need to edit a lot and don't want to loose any of the written word.

Photo credit: General Coordination of SUBA, Library Services Unit. Fabiola G. Terrazas , Aguilar, Y. (2010)

Your Dashboard has just received new option. You don’t have to worry that you’ll miss your friends' posts anymore. We’ll remind you about new ones.

Previously, to view all reviews, posts and shelf updates published by blogs you follow, you had to refresh the Dashboard. Now you’ll see a reminder note above the stream that there are new posts ready to be read.

Just click it to view new posts and bookshelf updates on your Dashboard added by your friends and followings once you were reading a book or taking a bath. 

The reminder note will be also visible in the browser's tab title letting you stay up to date and informed about the number of new texts on BookLikes while browsing other webpages. Cool? Not a modest approach but we love it!

Hope you'll find it useful as well :)

Tips and Updates

To make shelving books easier and faster, use "Shelve it!" option available on your Shelf page.

Drag the button to your bookmark bar and click "Shelve it!" on the bar while browsing other sites (e.g. Amazon...) to add books to your shelf directly from the sites.  

New Year brings a new way of finding books and reviews on BookLikes. From now on your shelves will be tags in your post.

Once you write a post about a given book, the shelves attached to that book will be added to your review/post as tags. Each of your thematic shelves will be visible in your writings, and once clicked will show other texts with this tag written by other BookLikers. 

New tags will help you in finding great reads on other blogs, interesting reviews and readers with similar reading taste. 

For example: the book pop up shows shelves the book is shelved on: 

When you create a post or a review with book from your shelf, the thematic shelves will be added as tags:

You can remove auto added tags and add new ones in Tag spot in writing box. 

Tips:

You can add new shelves on your Shelf Page or in book pop up by clicking Edit shelves after selecting reading status (Read, Planning to read, Currently reading).

Remember that you can add books on many shelves. It can be done either in book pop up (one book at a time; don't forget to save after adding and selecting new shelves)

or you can edit many books at once in table view of your Shelf.

Updates:

We've made updates to Shelf Widget on Goodies Page.

Now you can choose one of  your shelves, select number of books visible in widget and choose sorting option, and add Shelf Widget to your other webpages or to your BookLikes Page (paste widget code in Widget Area in customization tab). 

We love great quotes as much as we love great books. Let us present you extraordinary quotes that we found on your blogs (click on blog name, to go to blog / click on quote to go to post). 

via MAY'S BOOKS

via Eccentricities, Frequent Absurdities, and All-Around Silliness

via Trillian

via Twirling Book Princess

via Beyond Strange New Words

via Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile

via Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud

via Inguling

via BrokenTune - Reviews & Rants

via Christina Babbles

What's your favorite quote?

We’re in holiday spirit but we remember about Thursday features for you. Time for Christmas gifts!

Last week comment box received ‘publish’ button and this week brings edit option. No more typos in comments! From now on you can edit your notes under the posts.

You can also choose whether to allow non-BookLikes members to comment your posts or not. You can select your option in Settings/Blog.

If you don't want guests to comment on your blog, the guests comment box will disappear from your blog page. Then only BookLikes members will be allowed to add comments on your Blog page.

comment box with guest comments switch on

comment box with guest comments switched off

We love all kinds of books: paper, e-books, audiobooks and we enjoy reading about all of them. We've noticed that some of you are audiobook lovers and/or e-book fans so we've decided to add these two categories to BookLikes Blog Directory.

If you are the one, please add it to your blog profile in Settings/Blog. Click Edit Categories and select category that fits your reading preferences and reviews on your blog. Your blog will be categorized and presented on Explore page according to selected picks. Please remember to choose only the relevant categories that fit your reading taste and books reviewed on your blog.

Who wants a candy? 

Candy #1 - publish a comment

OMG, is it a plane, is it a star? No, it’s Publish button in comment box! It’s really here, go and check and leave us a comment :-) 

Now you can use Enter to add new line and click Publish to add a comment under a post.

Candy #2 - discussion stats

We've opened discussion statistics. Now you can view who said what and where, and join new groups and discussions.

Entrance to your stats in on the main page of the Discussion Rooms - just click My Stats to see groups you’ve created, discussion you've taken part in and recent posts.

To view discussion stats of other members, click Discussion stats in discussion thread. You'll be moved to a discussion profile of that person.

You can also view all members of a given group. Go to Group Page and click Group Info to see other BookLikers who joined a given group. To see discussion stats click the avatar.

Candy #3 - new themes

New blog themes are available in BookLikes Theme Store! Parajunkee, our new designer, stays busy and makes two more templates available for your blogs: Notebook ($9) and Voodoo Princess ($19). 

To see all blog themes, click Customize in Settings/Blog and then Themes in upper left corner. To buy themes click buy and follow the instructions (PayPal account required). Read more here.

Eat sweets without guilt, enjoy and stay busy on BookLikes :-)

Today we have something special for all those who would like to make their blogs even prettier than they are now. BookLikes welcomes new designer :-) Welcome, Parajunkee!

Some of you already know Parajunkee as a blogger and book reviewer and now you can get to know her awesome works :-) Boy, she’s talented! See for yourself. Her new templates are available on BookLikes Theme Store.

To view and purchase new design themes, please go to customization tab (entrance in Settings/Blog), then click Themes in the upper left corner and voila. Choose what you like: you can use one of BookLikes’ free themes or new ones made by Parajunkee.

You can choose from seven premium themes: Book Love,  Clouds, On My Shelf, Open The Book, Ribbon Bliss (each $9), and Flower Power, Sketch (each $19).

One you click yellow star, you'll see designer information and link to his/her webpage on BookLikes. To purchase one of new templates click Buy, view payment option and follow PayPal instructions (PayPal account is required). Once the payment is confirmed the new template will be unlocked and ready to use from Themes Page. Then just select the template, click Done on the top and enjoy your blog’s new look. 

If you have any questions about new templates or something gone wrong after uploading new design themes, please PM a designer. Terms of Services for Themes are available here and documentation for BookLikes Template Code in the footnote, click Themes. 

Are you a designer or know one? Let us know, we'd love to work with you! Drop us a line at contact@booklikes.com.

Updates:

- Table view of your Shelf received new sorting option: review date. Date of the review is visible for Reviewed books next to link to review.

Today we have something for all those of you who love tags. Some time ago we've added a spoilers tag and now it's time for a blockquote tag.

See how it works:

and your published text will look like this:

You can also add other formatting to text with blockquote tags, such as bold, italics, underline...

Updates:

Synchronization option is on again. You can connect your GR account with your BookLikes profile in Settings/Import. Sync option allows to mirror your BookLikes activity on your GR profile (read more here: BookLikes -> Goodreads Synchronization). Sync includes adding books, posting and editing reviews, adding/changing rating stars and creating new shelves. Read more on our FAQ site or mail us with any concerns and questions.

Tips:

- You can add additional pages and links to your BookLikes webpage in Settings/Pages. All new pages will be visible in your blog menu next to Blog, Shelf and Timeline (e.g. Bio, About Me, or redirected link). 

- If you wish to add additional page with a link to tagged texts, use the link from your public Blog view instead of Dashboard - then the link will be available and visible for non BookLikes members.

For example, if you would like to add link to texts with ‘tutorials’ tag, use the link: http://booklikes.com/tag/tutorials (click ‘tutorials’ tag on post page in public blog view, not on Dashboard) instead of this link http://booklikes.com/dashboard?tag=tutorials (this tag is clicked on Dashboard, visible only for people who are signed in at the moment).

Hey all! What are you currently reading? You can now update your reading progress with two clicks and share it with your friends. You’ll see new option on Dashboard in Currently Reading Section, just look on the right. It’s Update button :-)

Once you click Update you can fill up your reading progress, save and continue reading (update).

Or you can post it and share on your blog and among your friends (update and publish).

Both options are visible once you click Update in Currently reading box.

If you choose Update, you’ll change reading progress that is visible on your blog. And you can go back to reading :)

If you choose Update and publish, you’ll be moved to writing box with book attached, your current reading progress and social media switch on (green icons on the right) if you had connected them. If you didn't connect your Facebook or Twitter, you can do it in Settings/General. To turn off social media in writing box, click on icons and make them grey (deactivated).

Updates:

Discussion rooms

- We've made changes in discussion room and threads, now you can receive notifications about newly set discussions in a given group. If you wish to be informed, please go to Group page and choose “Yes” in notification section. Then once a new discussion is created, you’ll get a note about it.

- You can also made adding tags to your posts in discussion easier. We've made changes to list of tags:)

- It also easier to keep conversation going and answer to previous posts, we have new look for Reply posts: 

Messages:

Your personal messages page (PM) received new features of searching through messages, paging and deleting messages.

Tips:

- To find other reviews of a given title, go to book page OR type book title in Tag Search Box on Dashboard on the right. Then you'll see all writings about this book, including different editions and book sources. It also nice way of finding new blogs to follow :-)

- If you wish to find more blogs similar to yours, please take a look at your book blog categories and choose only those which are really relevant. Remember that the categories should reflect your reading taste and books you’re reading and reviewing on your blog. Best to choose several genre categories that you’re active in. Then you'll be able to find other bloggers with similar reading taste faster. 

To look through your book blog categories, go to Settings/Blog and click edit categories. And to look through blogs, go to Explore. 

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving Day!  And Thank You for being with us :-)