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BookLikes How-to: Housekeeping! or, Using the Mass Post Editor

 

-- A guest post by Jenn from Murder by Death

 

If you’re a BookLikes veteran or new to BookLikes but with a huge import of data, you might, like me, look back at all of that history and think “I really need to clean some of those posts up” or “shoot, I wish I’d been using ‘x’ tag on all of those posts”, but then you imagine actually doing it, shudder to yourself, and find that sorting out your sock drawer suddenly sounds exciting.

 

OR, like I’ve been doing lately, you’ve gone to tag a post, see the mile long list of previously used tags and think to yourself “WHY do I have all those tags?  Was I drunk when I thought ‘tthhpphhhttt’ would make a good tag?” or you notice that you’ve collected multiple versions of the same tag and wish you could just clean that mess up.

 

Well, you can. Only tags that are actively used show up in that previously used menu - deleting those unwanted tags from all your posts makes them disappear from the list too.  And you can do that easily using the Mass Post Editor - it takes the ‘tedious’ out of blog housekeeping and puts it back in the sock drawer where it belongs.

 

To get to the Mass Post Editor, use your Dashboard pull down menu to get to your dashboard blog page (not your fancy public blog) - (http://booklikes.com/blog).  You can also go direct by using the following address (assuming you’re currently logged into BookLikes): http://booklikes.com/post/mass-editor/

 

 

 

On your blog page, look for the Mass edit posts and tags link on the right side of your page:

 

 

The Post Mass Editor page is pretty easy to use, but here's an overview of what you’ll see (if this is old news for you, scroll down for more information on cleaning up your tag list):

 

A: sort by: allows you to specify whether you want to sort your results by Publish Date or by Rating, ascending or descending.

 

B: The number of results you’d like to appear on a single page (max is 100).

 

C: status: allows you to narrow down your results to show only posts that are scheduled to be published in the future, currently published posts, or draft posts.  Leave this menu at —select— to show all three.

 

D: type:  allows you to narrow down which type of posts you want to display: Text, Photo, URL, Video, Quote, and Review.  Leaving this at —select— will return all types.

 

Please note that the fields A-D are live update options. Your search results will update instantly after you make a selection from any of these four fields. Selections made using date from (E) and with tags (F) will require you to click Show (K).

 

E: If you know that the posts you want to work with were done within a certain time frame, you can use the date from and date to fields.

This is especially helpful if you’re trying to find posts from a specific game or challenge (and you remember the dates).

 

F: with tags: This will narrow down your post results to only the posts that currently have the tags you select here.  You can select as many as you need to further narrow down your results, or leave it at —select tag— to display all.

 

The selections above, A-F are designed not only to make it easier to find what you’re looking for, but also to minimise the load on the BookLikes servers; the more specific your criteria, the easier it is for the databases to return your results as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

 

G:  select all / unselect all:  Once you’re ready to work with your posts, you can either use the individual check-boxes on the left of each post entry to select them, or choose select all to choose all of the posts in the list.  Likewise, unselect all will clear all the checkboxes.

 

H:  x delete posts:  Maybe blogging right after the cocktail hour wasn’t such a good idea, or maybe you just have posts that have expired content and you want to get rid of them. You can select those posts here and hit delete posts. Just be careful - you can’t undo delete posts. Once they’re gone - they’re gone.

 

I:  x remove tags:  remove tags from selected posts.

 

J:  + add tags:  add tags to selected posts.

 

K:  Show:  use this button to apply specific time frames or tags to your results.

 

L:  Type and Title:  Click on either the type or title of a specific post to go to that post.

 

M:  This is a shortcut for the tag menu (F):  clicking on the tags here will put them in the with tags section - just remember to hit Show to update the results.

 

N:  Edit:  Takes you directly to the edit post page so you can edit the post.

 

 

As I said at the start, it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I want to show you how you can use the mass post editor to clean up any superfluous tags you might have acquired over the years.

 

Using myself as the guinea pig, I’ve found that I have two tags:  audiobook and audiobooks.  I don’t need to have both so I want to edit all of my posts so they only use audiobooks, thereby deleting audiobook from my tag list.

 

I’ve searched for all published posts that use audiobook (the tag I ultimately want to get rid of):

 

 

I’ve used select all to check all (three) posts currently using audiobook, and then I clicked on + add tags:

 

Note that you can use this menu to create new tags and apply them to posts too.

 

I’ve selected the audiobooks tag I want to add and clicked Add tags.

 

Next, I’ve hit select all again (the checkboxes clear each time so you don’t accidentally change posts you didn’t mean to change).

 

This time, I’ve clicked x remove tags:

 

 

 

This looks a bit different; x remove tags only shows you the tags that are currently applied to the posts you’ve selected.  So, I’ve checked audiobook and clicked Remove tags.

 

Done!

 

Now, it’s important if you’re trying to replace one tag with another that you add the new tag before you remove the old one because clicking Remove tags automatically updates your results list.  What does this mean?  Well, if I had removed the audiobook tag first, my result list after removing it would look like this:

 

 

 

As you can see - I no longer have any posts in my list to add my new tag to, because I no longer have any that are tagged with audiobook

 

So, add first, remove last.

 

Once you’ve done this, and assuming you’ve applied it to all your posts, you’ll find that old tag is history.  (To check, make a change anywhere in your search criteria - hit show if you need to - and force BL to search again.  This will refresh your tag list.)  Yay!  Only about 100 more to go!

 

 

If you’ve been thinking your blog needed a bit of housekeeping, check out the Post mass editor.  Even if you already run a tight ship, don’t forget it can be a valuable resource for finding posts that aren’t tied to books on your shelves. So if someone comes up to you someday asking you for that youtube link to that cat video… you know, that one - with the cat doing that cute thing?… you’ll have a place to start.  ;-)

 

Happy BookLiking!

 

Art by Akgulian, Nishan

Reblogged from BookLikes