{"id":1010,"date":"2020-05-11T02:17:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T09:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2021-11-09T19:23:36","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T03:23:36","slug":"web-book-reviews-yet-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/web-book-reviews-yet-again\/","title":{"rendered":"web: book reviews again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have a substantial pile of books I’ve read that will injure me in an earthquake. I ought to write perspicacious pithy reviews of them. I could write them on Amazon, but why should Amazon own and profit from my words? I could write them on https:\/\/lib.reviews\/<\/a> “a free, open and not-for-profit platform for reviewing absolutely anything, in any language,” but it seems a bit moribund. Instead I have this web site! Putting book reviews here will ensure they live forever in complete obscurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh no, not the semantic web again!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A long time ago I simply wrote a definition list<\/a> in HTML in Blogger with each book title followed by a paragraph underneath. Then the idea of a semantic web<\/a> came along: the web page should unambiguously tell machines that a chunk of writing is a review<\/em> of a particular book rather than me advertising some books for sale, or writing about the author. And it should tell the machines it’s a review by skierpage, of a book with a particular title and ISBN, who gives it a rating of 3 out of 5 stars, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why bother?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Disclaimer: all the semantic web work below is probably irrelevant. If your web page is important according to Google’s PageRank algorithm, then Google will devote AI to figuring out what it says, even if it has no, or incorrect, semantic markup. So most of those making the effort to do this semantic markup are shady SEO (search engine optimization) sites, trying to convince you that if you jump through all these hoops or pay them to do it, then your site on topic X will somehow rise in search results; from utter obscurity on the 20th page of search results to mostly ignored on the 4th page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

hReview microformat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2011 the leading implementation of this idea for plain web pages was microformats<\/a>: you probably already have the relevant pieces of text in your human-readable book review, so put additional markup (the ‘M’ in Hypertext Markup Language) around them identifying the bit that’s the rating, the summary, etc. using invisible HTML attributes like class=reviewer<\/code>, class=rating<\/code>, class=summary<\/code> , etc. So I wrote a<\/a> few<\/a> reviews<\/a> using an online tool<\/a> to generate the necessary HTML, which I pasted into WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So many schemas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The hReview microformat is still going and supposedly Google still parses it when it crawls web pages. Some big guns of Web 2.0 (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex) came up with their own standard for structured data, similar but different, at the poorly named schema.org<\/a>: “a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.” This got more detailed and complicated than microformats: there are separate related schemas for a review<\/a> by the person<\/a> skierpage about a book<\/a> authored by another person. And there are three ways you can put the machine-readable information into your web pages (two too many!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google provides a structured data markup helper<\/a> to guide me in creating this markup, and then its structured data testing tool<\/a> to see if I got it right. (There was another schema generator at tools.seochat.com now defunct, and other checkers at linter.structured-data.org\/<\/a> , https:\/\/jsonschemalint.com\/ , etc.) If you choose to put invisible markup in the page surrounding the text of your review (schema.org calls this “microdata,” different from “microformat”), the HTML looks something like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<!-- Microdata markup added by Google Structured Data Markup Helper. -->\n  <div itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/Book<\/a>\" id=\"hreview-Sprawling,-very-good!<\/a>\">\n  <meta itemprop=\"isbn<\/a>\" content=\"03-5091234-034<\/a>\">\n  <meta itemprop=\"genre<\/a>\" content=\"Science Fiction<\/a>\">\n  <meta itemprop=\"datePublished<\/a>\" content=\"2017-06-04<\/a>\">\n  <h3>Sprawling, very good!<\/h3>\n  <p>\n    <img itemprop=\"image<\/a>\" class=\"photo<\/a>\" src=\"https:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51Gvu3UlqGL.jpg<\/a>\" width=\"167<\/a>\" height=\"250<\/a>\" alt=\"cover of 'River of Gods'<\/a>\" align=\"left<\/a>\" style=\"margin-right: 1em<\/a>\"\/>\n  <\/p>\n\n  <div class=\"item<\/a>\">\n    <a title=\"paperback at Amazon<\/a>\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/River-Gods-Ian-McDonald\/dp\/1591025958<\/a>\" class=\"fn url<\/a>\">\n      <span itemprop=\"name<\/a>\">River of Gods<\/span>\n    <\/a>\n    by\n    <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ian_McDonald_%28British_author%29<\/a>\">\n      <span itemprop=\"author<\/a>\" itemscope itemtype=\"http:\/\/schema.org\/Person<\/a>\">\n        <span itemprop=\"name<\/a>\">Ian McDonald<\/span>\n      <\/span>\n    <\/a>\n  <\/div>\n  <p itemprop=\"review<\/a>\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/Review<\/a>\" class=\"description<\/a>\">\n    <abbr itemprop=\"reviewRating<\/a>\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/Rating<\/a>\" class=\"rating<\/a>\" title=\"4<\/a>\">\n      <span itemprop=\"ratingValue<\/a>\">4<\/span>\n      5\n    <\/abbr>\n    <span itemprop=\"reviewBody<\/a>\">This does a fantastic job of presenting the foreign culture of ... !<\/span>\n    <meta itemprop=\"datePublished<\/a>\" content=\"2007-08-01<\/a>\">\n    <span itemprop=\"author<\/a>\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/Person<\/a>\">\n      <meta itemprop=\"name<\/a>\" content=\"skierpage<\/a>\">\n      <meta itemprop=\"sameAs<\/a>\" content=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/about\/<\/a>\">\n    <\/span>\n  <\/p>\n<\/div><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The problem is, if I copy and paste this complicated HTML into WordPress’s post editor, it throws away much of the HTML markup, for example all the <meta><\/code> tags for information I don’t want to display, like <meta itemprop=\"datePublished\" content=\"2007-08-01\"><\/code>. There are any number of dubious plug-ins to WordPress that support parts of schema.org schemas and want money for a professional version from desperate non-technical web site owners who see their traffic dropping and will clutch at straws hoping to appear higher in Google search results, but I don’t understand what these plug-ins do or don’t do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another representation for this structured data is JSON-LD, a completely separate representation of the semantic information that you stick in your web page and the reader never sees it; see A Guide to JSON-LD for Beginners<\/a>. So maybe just sticking in a block of JSON-LD will work better (a guide to supporting it in WordPress is in section “Implementing Structured Data Using JSON-LD” in schema article at torquemag.io<\/a>). Hmmm…, instead of copying and pasting twice, can I put this inside WordPress myself? Maybe try Markup (JSON-LD) Structure in schema.org<\/a> plug-in for WordPress? wpengine article<\/a> has JSON-LD generators, but they’re not much good:<\/p>\n\n\n\n