Murder by Death

A few Booklikers have struggles with shelves and it's something I've been wanting to do but have been overwhelmed just thinking about it.  

Linda Hilton, though, got me started as she had specific problems and questions that gave me a point of reference to begin.

This is by no means a comprehensive tutorial, it will be added to over time, and if you have specific issues with shelves, please post them in the How To BookLikes Group, (or in the comments below) and I or someone else will do our best to get them answered.

I'm going to presume everyone knows how to get to their BookLikes shelves.  By default, BookLikes displays your shelves as, well, shelves.  This is fine, but sometimes you need to extra power seeing your shelves in list view allows, so if you see shelves, please change the view to lists by clicking on this button:

Once you're in your list view - take a moment to check out the differences.... then click the "Settings" button on your toolbar:

This will take you to your shelf settings where you can choose things like your default view, default sort order, etc. etc.  But for the purposes of this tutorial we're focusing on the shelves themselves, so scroll a bit until you get to the list of shelves towards the bottom.

What is going to follow is a giant graphic of that section with notations about each function.  It just seemed the clearest way to explain all the different bits:

Notes:  

Exclusive statuses - these are shelves that allow you to mark a book without also setting it as Read, Planning to Read, or Currently Reading.   The best example of the usefulness of this is dictionaries .  Most of the time, you don't actually read, cover to cover, a dictionary.  Creating an exclusive shelf called Reference allows you to shelve it without having to mark your intention of reading it.   There are many other examples of these types of books, so you can create as many exclusive shelves as you'd like.  The checkbox for set as status allows you to move your shelves back and forth between exclusive and non-exclusive (in case you change your mind someday and decide to read the OED cover to cover).

click and drag - please note that older browsers and computers might struggle with this - if you think you're tech isn't a young whipper snapper any longer, use the Position numbers instead (although if you have a lot of shelves, yes, they're a pain).

I included the visible columns part of the page in the image above for two reasons.  1. It's where you can decide what to display in your list view, and 2. to highlight the multiple "Save Changes" buttons.  Now, I don't know for sure but rather to be safe than sorry, use the Save Changes button that applies to each section of the settings page.  So if you make changes to the table -visible columns section, use that save button.  If you make changes to the exclusive statuses, use that save button.

I suspect they're all the same but the sheer number of them make me concerned that they're not.  So, like I said, better safe than sorry.

Hopefully that will start us off.  Let me know.  ;-)