I've finally, FINALLY finished moving my reviews from GR.

 

 

When I decided to move to BL, I had about 290 reviews on GR.

 

No sweat, right?  I plugged the CSV into the BL import function, waited (it took over a week), and took a look at the result.

It wasn't good.

If you've seen...well...any of my reviews, you'll probably have noticed that I depend heavily on spoilertags.  I effectively write two versions of every review: a generalized, blurby, and hopefully spoiler-free summary, and a heavily spoilery squee-and-or-snarkfest. I enjoy trying to create something which works whether or not you're looking at the spoilery asides. Living without spoilertags would, quite honestly, destroy half my fun in reviewing.

 

As I took full advantage of spoilertags on GR and the BL conversion did absolutely nothing with the spoilertag markup and showed all spoilers in plaintext, the result of my GR-to-BL import was disastrous.

Only about 40 of my reviews eschewed spoilertags; the rest had to go.  After I deleted all the mutilated carryovers, I decided I'd transfer the reviews by hand. I'd copy them over, spoiler-tag for BL, and replace the GR version with a link to the BL review and a bit of snarky commentary on GR policy. How hard could it be?

 

It only took about twenty reviews for me to realize that this was an absolutely terrible idea.  For one thing, formatting takes time.  For another, a lot of my reviews could definitely use some editing.  For a third, I didn't really want to swamp everyone's feeds with twenty old reviews at a time.  But I'm stubborn and prone to seeing even terrible ideas through. During this process, I removed about 80 reviews from GR as "not worth the effort"; quite a few required some amount of rewriting; the rest required copying, spoiler-tagging, backlinking, etc. I think I ended up copying around 200 reviews to BL; some were left as GR-only or deleted entirely.  On GR, almost every review that remains has been cut to a paragraph with two links: one to the full review and one to my summary of GR behaviour.  For me, it was kinda therapeutic; I suspect a lot of my copying impetus has been spite-motivated against GR.  As long as they leave in my commentary about GR's new policies of censorship, they are officially welcome to display my reviews wherever they please. (Snerk.)

 

The truly enjoyable aspect of the enterprise has been titles.  I've had tons of fun trying to come up with memorable quotes, fitting song lyrics, and groan-worthy puns.  It often required going back to the book or my notes or my GR review and digging out the one-line tidbit that, to me, captured the fun or the meaning of the story, so I ended up doing a sort of retrospective of my reading for the past few years.  I cannot begin to express how much of a kick I get out of titling--it's yet another reason why I can never move back to GR or similar. So many quotes. Soooo many bad puns and/or song references. ::Glee::

 

Thank you all for your patience with me clogging your feeds--I know that can be irritating, and I really appreciate how understanding all of you have been.  I have a few crappy reviews that I deleted from GR but still want to write proper reviews at some point, but for the most part, it will be all new books, so my post rate should go way down, especially as compared to these last few days.

 

Argh. The next big question: how on earth am I going to get my reviews onto LeafMarks? 

 

I've written quite a few reviews that appear only on BL, and the only thing left on GR is a bunch of stubs.  Oh, dear.  Please, BL, please give us an export function soon...and whatever happens to my spoilertags, I'm not doing this again for LM.

 

And so ends my GR-copying saga.