The one hobby (passion) that I have been able to sustain for many years is reading and participating in an online community of readers. I joined BookCrossing almost 10 years ago on 29 May 2002. While I found it fun to register books and make “wild releases” by leaving books in public locations, I wasn't getting many “catches”—the books I had released weren't getting journaled, and I was afraid that they were winding up in the trash.
Then I discovered an online community called BookRelay and proceeded to join in a couple of swaps. But life got busy and I stopped swapping for a while and when I next visited the site, it had been shut down. Fortunately, I was able to find a forum post at BookCrossing mentioning that the BookRelay folks had moved to a new site called BookObsessed. I joined in mid-September 2007 and participated in my first swap in October. I still have the books I won in that swap!
At the beginning of this year, the folks at BookObsessed started talking about running their own reading challenge and eventually settled on a "2012 How Many" Challenge. Several of the BookObsessors mentioned that they were also participating the 2012 Reading Challenge at GoodReads. Now, I've been a member at GoodReads nearly as long as I've been at BookObsessed. I joined in January of 2008, but all that I've done there—for the most part—is post the books that I've finished reading to my Bookshelves. When I checked out the challenge at GoodReads, I discovered the widget which can be placed in blog templates. This widget is supposed to allow you to show the ongoing progress in the challenge and I thought that would be a good addition to my blog sidebar. So, as I previously posted, I signed up for the 2012 Reading Challenge at GoodReads. After all, I didn't have to do anything extra to keep a public record of the how I was making progress in the challenge: just adding the books to my “Read” bookshelf with a completion date in 2012—which I was already doing.
And now that the Bout of Books read-a-thon is going on, some of the participants are posting status at GoodReads, so I'm spending even more time on the site. It's becoming another place where I'm connecting with the community of readers.
Unfortunately, I think the JavaScript for the GoodReads widget is broken. Mine never updated in this blog, even though more books had been added. Here's what I kept seeing in my blog sidebar:
But when I viewed my GoodReads profile page, I saw this:
So I removed the widget from my sidebar. It seemed that the only way it would be accurate was immediately after I generated the widget. With the JavaScript routine broken, the static information was all that was displaying on my blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment