a lifestyle blog for book lovers

What you need to know about finding book information on MMD.

Back in May, this site finally got the makeover that was in the works for a long, long time.

One of the reasons for the update was to make the bookish posts more useful, and to make easier it browse the archives and track down books you remember reading about on MMD.

Unfortunately, all that added functionality didn’t happen by magic: it’s taken us months (read: a lot longer than I expected) to update the back end of the site.

We finally have most of the archives indexed—not all, but enough for the search and cross-reference features to be useful.

Let me show you how it works.

Book listings

You may have noticed that bookish posts look slightly different than they did before. Here’s a tiny snippet of how a book list looks these days: 

My Book Table screenshot book list post

If you click on the book title, it takes you to Amazon for more information. If you click on the cover image or “more info” it takes you to the individual book page on Modern Mrs Darcy, which looks like this:

my book table individual book listing

In the book listing, the author, series, genre, and tag are all hyperlinked (e.g., click on “Louise Penny” and you’ll be taken to a list of all the books by that author that appear on MMD).

The “mentioned in” listing is just that: this is a list of all posts that mention this book. If you click on the post title you’ll be taken straight there. (Note: we had to update this information manually. It’s not yet foolproof, but because we’ve manually updated most of the 1000+ posts in the archives, it works most of the time. All 2015 posts are properly indexed.)

You may notice a few posts that look like this at the bottom:

my book table books mentioned in screenshot

These blurbs were added so that books mentioned in the post would appear properly in the book archives.

The card catalog

Just like the library, this is where you can browse all (or right now, most of) the books that have ever been mentioned on Modern Mrs Darcy and easily find relevant posts. Search by title, author, or genre, or just scan the visual gallery of book covers.

Here’s an example of what that looks like:

screen shot card catalog

Click on any book cover to view the individual book listing, which will include a list of all the places that book is mentioned on the blog.

Visit the card catalog here to do a little exploring.

This page is flexible: I’d love to hear how the card catalog page looks on your screen and how it could be most useful to you.

20 comments

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  1. Jennifer says:

    I’m so glad you did this! Thank you! Just a week or so ago I was thinking about a book you mentioned here and wondering how easy it would be to go back and find it. Of course, now that I’ve got a super easy way to find it (thank you again!), I just need to remember the title of the book I was thinking about!

    • liz n. says:

      LOL!

      I know you meant to write “massive,” but can’t you see Anne finishing this huge task and celebrating with a spa massage to relax! (Which you totally should do, Anne!)

  2. Karen says:

    While I used to be able to click on your books to go to Amazon, on this post when I try to do that the “pin it” button comes up and I am not able to go either to Amazon nor to the more info page of the blog.
    Just want to add that I really love and appreciate your book recommendations. Thanks.

    • Amy says:

      The links to Amazon still work on her site. 🙂 For this post, the books shown are screenshots of existing pages & that is why they are showing to Pin only.

      • Anne says:

        This is true, but Karen, if you are in fact having a problem on the actual book listings, please let me know right away (if you could mention what device and browser you’re using that would help tremendously) because that should NOT happen!

  3. Susan says:

    I was looking at books on your site (duh!) and I read that the 2012, 2013 and 2014 Summer Reading Lists are “archived”. How can I get these? Thanks in advance! 🙂 I don’t need to sign up for emails for your blog posts b/c I’m here everyday anyway, looking at the Kindle Deals. 🙂

    • Anne says:

      It’s easy—they’re on the home page now. Go to modernmrsdarcy.com and look for the “summer reading guides” heading right across the top. 🙂

  4. Suzanne says:

    It’s so much work that you have undertaken but it much appreciated. I can often remember that I have read something here but can’t remember when. It’s usually farther back than I recall so this will make my searches much easier.

  5. Heather says:

    Anne, you are my best source for finding new books. Thanks for that. I also learn a lot from your thoughtful posts about life.

  6. Ginger says:

    Thank you so much for all the hard work you’ve put in.

    Friends are always asking me for book recommendations, and I love trying to give them a few I think they like, but then I tell them if nothing tickles their fancy, to check here for lots of quality selections.

    As I say, “Modern Mrs. Darcy never steers me wrong.”

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