The following books have had their placements corrected in the reading order.
Green Lantern: Legacy – The Last Will and Testament of Hal Jordan (Thanks Daniel!)
JLA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told
Superman / Supergirl: Maelstrom
Superman / Batman: Finest Worlds
Batman: Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?
Batman: The Scottish Connection
The Life Story of the Flash (Thanks again, Daniel!)
Batgirl: Year One (these stories around the premier of Batgirl are moved to match her Silver Age creation in January 1967)
Teen Titans: Year One (Moved to match the Teen Titans Silver Age debut is June 1964)
Those are all the updates/tweaks I had written down for books already in the Recommended Reading Order, so now I’m going to get back to adding unplaced books.
Ok, so I don’t know how feasible this is as a change for you to do, or if its the kind of thing that would be useful to more people than just me, but here’s something that would help my use of this site immensely if it could be pulled off…
As you know, I keep a separate list that is my condensed list of books to read to catch up, which is independent of a complete checklist. Which means that whenever books are moved here, I have to update that list correspondingly. What would make that so much easier would be if the info page for books, in addition to the other details, included what number the book currently is in the DC reading order list. That way when I adjust my list, all I need to do is have a field in my spreadsheet for that number, and I can just change the number when you move a book and excel will resort for me. Does that make sense?
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yeah it makes a lot of sense. It’s something I’d like to have to (would make my life a lot easier.) I would also like it to show what page of the reading order the book is currently on.
The problem is that each book is on a few different lists that are sorted by categories, and then a ton of lists sorted by tags and custom taxonomies.
I’m not sure how to make it only care about its order in one of those lists. What I can do (and just realized this) pretty easily is have it show the digital version of the date (wordpress sorts posts by date, by default) as a book “Placement” number, which you could put in your file and then use to order the books.
If you’re looking at the excel file I sent you, check out the “csv_post_date” column – that’s the value that’s being used to sort the book in the Recommended Reading Order list. A different value (end date, which is NOT in the file, but is online on some of the books so far.. about 320 of em) is used to sort the lists chronologically.
These values are currently only being used in the backend, but I can display them if you think it would be useful.
As for numbering the book with what place it is on the timeline in a pretty manner “Book #1482” for example, I’m not sure how to have that correct itself dynamically as I add new books or switch lists (that contain the same book).
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Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. Well, showing the csv_post_date on the book info pages would be incredibly helpful to me, at least. My reading file is basically just a trimmed down list that I keep sorted to the recommended reading order, so that would definitely solve my problem where updating it to reflect changes is concerned.
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cool beans. It’s a great idea. Teamwork!
I’ll finish up with the books I have open in tabs right now, post that update list, and then get right on this.
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The new additions to the book info pages are up now. Look like what you needed?
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Looks fantastic, man. Now my project for the night is to get those in my reading list! *grin*
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Thanks! I’m making the book pages a little more user friendly by adding some dropdown help menus to each section. I don’t feel they really need it, except that last one, but I think people will appreciate the extra info.
Plus they’re damn sexy. I didn’t realize the code was this easy until tonight.
I may use them in the timelines – wouldn’t it be sweet if you could see ALL the book’s info without loading a seperate page? Just click the “more info” button and it drops down right in the timeline? That was originally how I wanted the site to work, but I thought it was too hard. Now that each book has a permalinked page though, I think I might try and get it going.
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Oh yeah, that sounds awesome. Can’t wait to see how that looks.
Especially for use in the timeline — I was just thinking that that was going to be the one time consuming part of the process for what I’m doing now…loading the page for each individual book.
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yeah, especially since they load so darn slow.
The downside will be less people will see conversation on the books and I’ll have less pageviews for my ads… lol. But I think increased functionality is worth it.
As long as including all that info for every book doesn’t make it go even slower. :-/
But this will take a while to figure out. On the single book pages the divs are numbered, I’m not sure how to make each one unique for every book.
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Totally off topic, but this will make you laugh.
Today was the last session for my class before finals, which I always set aside as a review session. Which is fun, but kinda stressful, because basically it means that I get hammered with questions for 90 minutes without notes. So I have to be able to get to a reasonable answer to any question these kids have about global politics pretty fast.
That means that I have to speak off-the cuff, and so my mind is running a mile a minute to keep the info flowing, and occasionally there are slips of the tongue. Like today.
Someone asked how the retirement of the Japanese PM yesterday related to contemporary perception of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.
Here was my reply: “Well as we’ve discussed, that issue is one of the biggest political cleavages in Japanese society, particularly in the last few years where there was extensive controversy regarding the JSA’s support of American troops in the Iraq war. Umm, excuse me, I mean the JSDF’s support.”
lol
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hah. pretty good. I can’t believe I’ve managed to go this long without doing something similar at work.
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