Bookshelf books order keeps changing

Hosting on Micro.blog
1

:wave:
This is the second time this particular issue has happened to me, so maybe I’m doing something wrong.

I’ve manually imported all my reading history on Micro.Blog, adding a Finished date for each book so that they’re neatly ordered chronologically. A few months ago (September?) I noticed that for many of them the date was changed, and I saw books I’d read years ago listed among the latest. So I set out to manually reorder them once again, but today I noticed that the problem has presented itself again.

I do a monthly backup of my website, and I noticed that this has been the case at least since December.

I’m using a fairly custom theme, but the problem is not on the “view” side. I can see the order messed up straight from the micro.blog interface, with books’ finished dates apparently randomly changed.

Now:

  1. Is there any chance I’m doing something wrong?
  2. Can I bulk re-upload the data/bookshelf.json file from a previous backup?

Thanks!

2

I’ve never gotten the orders to really work correctly, which is why I personally abandoned the singular read shelf in favor of year-based shelves that I present myself. The orders are not perfect, but good enough for me with that solution.

I think there’s something funky with a number of different dates being stored and no great default sorting going on.

3

I’ve seen this too. I don’t have an explanation yet except that Micro.blog is getting confused as it tries to figure out the dates. I’ll review this again and get it fixed.

1 Like
4

Hey guys, thanks for getting back to me!

It’s not the order that I’m worried about (the dates are not actually shown on my website crlzff.xyz / Books) as much as the dates being changed in the first place, since I’m using the Bookshelves feature as my single-source-of-truth for my reading.

Anyway, just wanted to point that out if anyone else experiences the same thing.

Any chance I can bulk reupload an older data/bookshelf.json file from a previous backup to keep things squared away for the time being?

5

Can you email me your bookshelf.json backup file to help@micro.blog? I can probably restore the finished dates and it would also help me understand which books got out of sync. I’ve been looking through this and can’t see where the problem is.

6

I think I found the issue. I’ll have a fix ready this week so it doesn’t happen again.

7

Thank you, Manton. I was about to send the email, but upon closer inspection of the JSON file, I noticed that while the books are listed in the correct order, each object is missing the “date” property. So I guess restoring this file wouldn’t be of much use.

Extract:

[
    {
        "title":"Supercommunicators",
        "author":"Charles Duhigg",
        "isbn":"9780593243916",
        "cover_url":"https://cdn.micro.blog/photos/300x/https%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%2Fcontent%3Fid%3DZLbNEAAAQBAJ%26printsec%3Dfrontcover%26img%3D1%26zoom%3D5%26source%3Dgbs_api"
    },
    {
        "title":"Slow Productivity",
        "author":"Cal Newport",
        "isbn":"9780593544853",
        "cover_url":"https://cdn.micro.blog/photos/300x/https%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%2Fcontent%3Fid%3DIV_DEAAAQBAJ%26printsec%3Dfrontcover%26img%3D1%26zoom%3D5%26source%3Dgbs_api"
    },
    ...       
]
8

That’s unfortunate. I’m adding the finished date to the JSON so it’ll be there next time.

9

Thanks again :+1:

10

Note I discovered importing dups all the titles already in there.