I have a review coming up that will have a link to an older review - because one of my favorite obscure and weird Victorian writers has popped up unexpectedly - and in trying to tidy up that old review I can't tell if I'm having quote problems because it's an imported review from GR and there's messy code, or whether something has changed with the quotes within reviews. Which is a really convoluted way of saying, hey I'm going to post something to test blockqutoes.

I'll just grab some bookish articles I've read in the past week or so. All from the Guardian, because I end up clicking a lot of their bookish links.

 

Quiz: Can You Identify These Classic Books by Their Covers?

Guardian, 22 May, 2014

Because I'm a sucker for online quizzes. (I just know never to give any of them my email address.) This particular one relies on whether you've seen a very particular cover or not - because all of the books listed have had many variations of cover design. I totally guessed on several of them. (There is a show answers link on the page with your score.)

 

Marriage Plots: The Best Wedding Dresses in Literature

Guardian, 20 May, 2014

"...In the 19th century a new dress might be obtained for the wedding, but it is not necessarily white, and it will be used again – and plenty of women just wore their best dress, perhaps with a veil. The tradition for white seems to have started with the weddings of Queen Victoria and then her daughters, but took a long time to catch on. The one-off wedding dress is a 20th-century invention, and even then, as we discover in the work of Nancy Mitford and Somerset Maugham, a new bride was expected to wear her wedding dress to her first dinner parties."

 

And aside from parties you were also to wear that wedding dress when you were buried - but I think that was a much older tradition.

Linda Grant: I Have Killed All My Books

Guardian, 16 May, 2014

"...In the middle of my move I watched a documentary called The Flat. A family was clearing out the Tel Aviv apartment of a 97-year-old woman who had recently died. She had lived there for 70 years, since arriving from Germany in the 30s. The walls of the flat were lined with books published in her native language. Her grandson called in an antiquarian book dealer. He took the volumes off the shelf and hurled them with force to the floor. "No one reads Balzac," he said. "No one reads Shakespeare. Nobody wants Goethe. Know how many books they throw away in Germany?"

 

...It is more than 50 years since I began to build my library from its earliest foundations in the elementary sentence construction of Enid Blyton. Now, at least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the worst things I have ever done. I hate myself. But not as much as I have come to hate the books. Hate books! A thought-crime at the very least. Only a philistine, a religious zealot, a Nazi would hate books.

 

It is not the words I hate, not literature, but their physical manifestation as old, musty, dusty, yellowing, cracked objects, heavy to lug around. When I open the pages swarms of black ants dance on the paper. No one told me. No one said: "In the future you will squint and screw up your face and try to decipher these words you once read so easily." When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Alice in Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her."

I just recently went through my own "I'm moving" book cull, and though I wouldn't have phrased it the way she does, I went through a lot of the same feelings. First not wanting to get rid of any of them, then (honesty time!) realizing some were never going to be read again, then realizing how very many I had (reality of shelf space time!). It helps to know that her longish article is an excerpt from a Kindle single, so you're not getting her entire thought progression on the subject. But I'm not sure how many would want to buy that (the kindle single, not the thought progression) since it seems like just a long blog-like, talking to yourself, reminiscing about books. You get the feeling she's working out her feelings through the writing.

And if you were still wondering - the quote issue is purely in the one post via import - no problems in creating this post. As I suspected. (Sigh.) Time to clean up whatever old code is messing things up. (I think it comes down to the use of line break code which are sometimes used instead of paragraph breaks in GR for some reason - or at least in my old posts.)

So I took screenshots of what blockquotes look like in the various free themes. I'm going to post a link to this in a thread in the Official Discussion Group, but this post seemed like an easier thing to link to. I've tried to find a "search Discussions" link in there to find out if someone's brought this up already, but there's isn't one, er right? I also did a Find search and a quick google, but can't find that anyone's asked about it. So I'll make a new thread. And add a link to it here, as soon as this posts.

Thread link:

Discussion: Problems with Blockquotes Within Reviews in Booklike's Free Themes

Example images below are linked to Flickr pages with full size screenshots.

1) Bundled (in Chrome)

2) Custom Colors (in Firefox)

3) Gentle Spirit (in Firefox)

4) Smart Casual (in Firefox)

I could be completely happy with so much in Bundled or Custom Colors except I just can't find an easy way to tweak the blockquotes, and background and font color of one (Bundled) and the font choice of the other (Custom Colors) are both a big no for the readability of the text.

Bundled also has problems as far as what choice you make for link colors - it's really easy to have it blend into a background color choice. (Some of this may be my choice of colors - I didn't try many variations to find out. The blockquote problem seemed a bigger issue.)

Something is really odd in Custom Colors because I have my blockquotes all set to align left and not center - and you can see the same text in the Custom Color theme suddenly is center aligned. The others are all left aligned.

While Gentle Spirit and Smart Casual aren't much fun color and font wise - but here's what works:

1) blockquotes are in a clear, readable font, properly set away from the rest of the text,  and the align left added in dashboard formatting remains in place.

2) links stand out from the background, are differentiated from regular text and are readable.

Why Blockquotes Matter:

I know a lot of folk may not see quotes as terribly interesting, but for me it's the best way of giving an example of what a book's like. They're the best way you can convince me that a book's writing is as wonderful as you say it is - or as horrible. Using quotes allows the book to speak for itself. And the formatting matters because you want to have a clear indication of the words that aren't yours, but are the author's.

But then I'm also biased because I often post quotes in reviews so I can quickly look them up. It's especially nice when I no longer have access to the book for some reason.

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).