Hot GR Spots, New Tips & Tricks and Random Goodness

[Laurielu]

Thanks for the information AH! Downloaded...

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Cool! Thanks for sharing! I'll hop over and check it out.

[Literary Ames]

New Recommendation Request feature HERE.

Announcement and discussion of this feature HERE.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Very cool! BTW - John Christy wants to read: gud

What the heck is a 'gud'?? LOL!

[Literary Ames]

LMAO! Spelling is everything and the kids these days...and OMG he's 24, same age as me. He should know how to spell "good".

[AH]

Amy or "Ames" wrote: "LMAO! Spelling is everything and the kids these days...and OMG he's 24, same age as me. He should know how to spell "good"."

Nothing surprises me anymore. They don't correct spelling at school any more because red ink hurts your self esteem.

[Literary Ames]

Nonsense! How are you supposed to learn if no one tells you you've got it wrong? We've got to get over this political correctness crap and tell it like it is. Constructive criticism is the key.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

LMAO! "red ink hurts your self esteem" Seriously!?! Is that why purple pens are so popular in the stores now? I can understand kick-ball being hard on kids, but come on, red ink? Get over it. Red was my favorite color in school and all my teachers blessed with much of it daily! LOL! :)

Oh, he meant good, I didn't even get that much from it. LOL! I was thinking it might be a new genre abbreviation or something.

[AH]

Oh, I agree with you. I just find it silly too.

[Sandra, Kindle Operator Licence Required]

Can't understand those people asking for recommendations without saying what they want. You could recommend them anything, fiction, non-fiction, romance books for the guys - anything you like.

And agree entirely with Ames, you can't improve if no-one points out your mistakes, in a nice way of course.

Red ink was used by teachers here to mark so even if you got an "A" it was usually in red ink. LOL.

[Vivian]

People don't spell anymore, w@ W txtN n ll dat gud comp stuf. Plus, spell check makes people lazy. When the words are underlined --> means it's not spelled correctly, so fix it! Really bothers me, in case you couldn't tell. My grammar may suck, but there are no excuses for spelling when on a computer.

If you ever need to translate text to English, try this site:
http://www.lingo2word.com/translate.php

And yes, I had the above translated. I still spell out "you" in texts because I'm old-school like that.

[Sandra J]

This is a hot button topic for me. I taught fourth grade for 38 years and used a red pen liberally. Spell check won't pick up on homophones (it's/its; their/there/they're; then/than-not really homophones but frequently misused), and that makes me crazy! And it seems that no one edits anything anymore.

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

Being one of the RED PEN WIELDERS...I say, RED ROCKS! I use it frequently & liberally. My big pet peeve is starting sentences with conjunctions (and, but...for Americans of a certain age, think back to Schoolhouse rock, "Conjuction junction, what's your function?")

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

Vivian wrote: "If you ever need to translate text to English, try this site:
http://www.lingo2word.com/translate.php..."

That's fun...I'm putting it up for my uni kids to play with (with the explanation that is NOT acceptable language for most of the situations they use, but it can help them understand some of the stuff floating around on mainly English social networks :D

[Sandra, Kindle Operator Licence Required]

Judithe wrote: "My big pet peeve is starting sentences with conjunctions (and, but...for Americans of a certain age, think b..."

Sorry Judithe, I know it's wrong but I've been doing that a lot since I joined GR.

Vivian, I still "you" as well. That won't be changing.

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

Actually, I have no (usually "no") prob with that in a conversation. If it pops up in an essay, or something similar.........kids have occasionally "encouraged" me to stop reading homework until after they go to bed..."Mom, shouldn't you be relaxing and reading a book...rather than throwing pens and teaching us bad words?"

[Sandra, Kindle Operator Licence Required]

LOL. Naughty Judithe :D

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

:D

[Steph, Serious series addict]

LOL! I'm terrible. I tend to type like I talk, southern slang and such. Sorry for any red ink moments I've caused. >:)

@Vivian, fun site. I've bookmarked it for those times when I can't figure out what someone's trying to say.

[Literary Ames]

New Goodreads Android App! I've downloaded and played with it. I'm a very happy bunny.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

I love having GR on my phone! Esp when I'm in need of a quick reminder of what I'm lookin' to buy at the store or update my status, etc. Enjoy! :)

[Literary Ames]

Coming Soon: The New Goodreads Book Club

[Sandra, Kindle Operator Licence Required]

Sounds like a good thing for GoodReads to do. Hope it goes well, but not a book I'm interested in sadly.

[Literary Ames]

I'm not interested in the book either especially as it's so expensive for so few pages.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Ditto. I'll keep an eye on the club though and see how it goes. Maybe they'll choose a book down the road that'll appeal to me.

Thanks for sharing the info, Ames.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Just found out if you hold your pointer over a book listed on a book page (eg: in the 'related books' list) it'll give you a pop-up showing the book description. Nifty :)

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

Cool!

[Regina]

I love how they are constantly doing new things here on GR. I love in the GR app, that now if I click to see a discussion from the status updates, if I scroll down to the bottom I can copy the URL and then choose to go to a web browser to view the discussion. It is a great concession bc viewing discussions in the app sucks.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Ditto. They are always tweaking things trying to make things better for everyone. Fun! :D

[Literary Ames]

Goodreads Android app update which includes a barcode scanner.

The Goodreads Book club has gone LIVE with over 1,000 people so far joining the challenge of reading the first book. I'm not participating with this read but it's interesting to see how they've set it up.

"Like for like" recommendations soon to be on every book page. If you check out the right side of the Mockingjay page you'll see a section called 'Readers Also Enjoyed'. Looks fairly accurate so far.

[Regina]

Oh I just read the book they are reading. I think I will join in.

[Literary Ames]

Was that a coincidence? If so, you're psychic powers are spot on. So...what are this week's lottery numbers?

[Regina]

LOL. They probably chose it bc I did, I heard a review on NPR in the fall and then bumped it up bc it was a Pulitzer Prize winner. However, I did win the fish bowl contest this week at Chipotle this week - lunch for 10 people all bc I dropped my business card in a fish bowl. :)

[Literary Ames]

Wow! 10 people -that had to be worth quite a bit. Lucky!

[Regina]

It was a fun time. I felt lucky that day.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

I saw when that one won the Pulitzer, but haven't read it. Was it good? Guess it would be, yah? PPrize and all. LOL!

I'll have to keep an eye on the BC and see if they read something I'd like to read as well.

Thanks for the updates, Ames.

[Dana]

Judithe wrote: "Being one of the RED PEN WIELDERS...I say, RED ROCKS! I use it frequently & liberally. My big pet peeve is starting sentences with conjunctions (and, but...for Americans of a certain age, think b..."

We currently have this on loan from the library. I personally felt that it was an essential step in my daughter's pre-kinder education. The shows in that collection are basically responsible for the literacy of an entire generation.

I would bet flat money that most of Gen-X (my peeps) would admit that the credit for having a clue what a conjunction is, goes entirely to Schoolhouse Rock. :)

That and knowing how to count to 12...one/two/three, fooour, fiiive, six/seven/eight, niiine, teeen, eleven/tweee-eeeEE-EEEElve! :)

[AH]

Conjunction, junction, what's your function?

I loved Schoolhouse rock! Absolutely brilliant.

[Dana]

AH wrote: "Conjunction, junction, what's your function?

I loved Schoolhouse rock! Absolutely brilliant."

Hooking up words and phrases and clauses....... :)

[Steph, Serious series addict]

I loved SHR too! :) ...I'm just a bill... is the one that stuck with me.

[Dana]

I LUV that one!

I LMAO at my son after the first time he listened to that one. He is eating yogurt at the table and watching/singing with that song. The minute the song is over, he says to me (he's 7 mind you), "Hey mama, was 'shooting other people with your ray gun' a bill before it was a law?"

Seriously?

[Steph, Serious series addict]

LOL! Too cute! From the mouths of babes, yah? :)

[Dana]

Completely! If I ever want to write sci-fi, I'll just have my son tell me a story and then convert it to an 'adult' crowd. His stuff would be way better than mine!

[Steph, Serious series addict]

LOL! :)

[Steph, Serious series addict]

GR now has a new way to view your books read. I'm sure by now you all know you can view your book stats by # of books per year and # of pages per year.

Now, you can also view "by publication year" to see when you read books published in a certain year.

Here's a screen shot of mine:


If you hold your pointer over the dots you get a pop-up bubble that tells you when it was published and when you read it. (Not really sure what all the extra #s after the decimal point mean? - "2007.9954369154 / 2006" example)

To get to this information:
- Click on "my books" arrow on the GR header bar
- Click on "stats" in the little drop down list
- Click on publication year

[Judithe, Soap Operas never end....]

Funky!

[Steph, Serious series addict]

Right? Not really something I'd thought about looking deeply into. :)

[Sandra, Kindle Operator Licence Required]

I had a look at mine, and it looks totally different, and I couldn't work out the axis values apart from years.

And those numbers are weird, I agree.

[Steph, Serious series addict]

LOL! Some techie with too much time on his hands said, "Hey, know what would be cool to track? ... I can build that!"

[Deborah]

Sandra wrote: "I had a look at mine, and it looks totally different, and I couldn't work out the axis values apart from years.

And those numbers are weird, I agree."

Yours doesn't parse well because you have two books with negative publication dates, it would look better if you could fix those. I think it would be more useful if you could restrict it by a date range.

The numbers after the decimal point shouldn't be displayed they are just the result of moving the date read to a 4 digit number. The heading is a little strange too because it just says published in when the first number is the year read.