Introducing PageBlaze

[Bradles]

PageBlaze is a web app for logging reading time and progress. It includes the following features:

• Daily target and yearly goals
• "To Read", "Reading" and "Finished" collections
• Add books manually, or from sources such as LibraryThing, Google Books and Marvel Comics
• Free to use (sign-up required) but donations are always welcome.

Read more here: https://pageblaze.warrilow-apps.click/index.html

Sign up / sign in here: https://pageblaze.warrilow-apps.click/

[Bradles]

Got a good streak going in another app?

Send us an email, ideally with a screencap of your streak, confirm your verified PageBlaze user email address, and we'll update your streak for you.

This is my streak from Apple Books:

Email pageblaze.support@warrilow-apps.click.
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[Bradles]

As you know, there are two ways to add books in PageBlaze:

• Manually
• From a source

When adding from a source in particular, it is important to prevent duplicate books from being added. You might want to revisit LibraryThing to refresh your "Finished" collection for example.

On the flipside, you might want to add multiple editions of the same book from the same source, for example a paper book and an audio book, then edit the titles to disambiguate. It would be annoying if you couldn't do that.

Here's how it works...

When adding from a source, for example Google Books, each source has a "source" attribute (e.g. "Google") and a "source identifier" (e.g. "B9AwyQEACAAJ"). If you attempt to add a book with the same source identifier from the same source again, it will not be added, it will remain selected in the "Add Books" list, and a notification will tell you what's happened:

When adding manually, or editing an existing book, duplicate detection is based on author and title. If attempting to add a book called "Emma" by "Jane Austen" (or edit an existing book to be such), you will get a notification:

You might consider appending the edition information to the title, e.g. "Emma (Audiobook)" or "Emma (ebook)".
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[Bradles]

In the Reading Now screen, under "This Week" or "This Month" there are various colourful buttons:

So what do the colours mean?

Grey: No reading.
Yellow: Some reading, but didn't meet target.
Green: Met target.
Outline: Future date.

You can click the yellow and green buttons to list reading events:

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[Bradles]

PageBlaze is described as being "Globally Distributed", which means it has all the "back-end" services (databases, etc.) deployed in three geographical regions: US; EU and Australia. They're all identical, with changes to the database being replicated within a few milliseconds.

When you visit https://pageblaze.warrilow-apps.click, one of the back-end services automagically selects the nearest region to you using "network latency". In simple terms, network latency is the time it takes for information to go from your device to a server and back again. The lower the latency, the better the apparent performance of the website.

Based on where you are in the world, you will be redirected to one of three sites: https://pageblaze-au.warrilow-apps.click, https://pageblaze-eu.warrilow-apps.click or https://pageblaze-us.warrilow-apps.click.

If one of those sites is down, e.g. for scheduled maintenance, you will instead be redirected to one of the available sites. (This is called "failover".)

You can bookmark and visit those sites directly, but bear in mind that you won't have the advantage of automatic failover.

[Bradles]

You may be wondering "why can't I enter a reading goal for next year?"

The field to enter a reading goal for the following year will appear in December of the current year, i.e. you can enter a reading goal for 2026 starting December 1st, 2025:

This was done to keep the "Settings" screen simple and tidy. Let us know if you think it should be done differently.
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[JSWolf]

What I would like to track is the number of pages I've read.I see no way to do that.

[Bradles]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I would like to track is the number of pages I've read.I see no way to do that.

No, not at the moment. I'm surprised calibre doesn't have a plug-in for that!

From what I've been able to gather:

• Google Books returns a page count if using the "FULL" list of columns. (I'm using the "LITE" subset.)
• Marvel returns a page count.
• LibraryThing doesn't return a page count

And of course I can add page count as an attribute for manually added books.

I imagine users would enter the "pages read" in the "Reading Now" screen, and PageBlaze would automatically calculate the percentage.

Or do you envisage this as an "either or" type situation, with a user preference to use percentage complete versus pages read?
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[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Bradles

No, not at the moment. I'm surprised calibre doesn't have a plug-in for that!

From what I've been able to gather:

• Google Books returns a page count if using the "FULL" list of columns. (I'm using the "LITE" subset.)
• Marvel returns a page count.
• LibraryThing doesn't return a page count

And of course I can add page count as an attribute for manually added books.

I imagine users would enter the "pages read" in the "Reading Now" screen, and PageBlaze would automatically calculate the percentage.

Or do you envisage this as an "either or" type situation, with a user preference to use percentage complete versus pages read?
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The page number Google Books returns as it's always going to be wrong. What I want to use is the ADE page number from my eBooks. So I can have the same page number as my eBooks. I don't mind manually entering the data to get it to be accurate. The thing is, you might have to allow duplicate books because of differing page numbers.

[Bradles]

I've added this (pages read / page count) to the roadmap. Should be able to work on it this weekend. I'll post an update here when it's ready for testing.

I think how it will work is pages read and page count will only be shown in "Reading Now" if page count is not blank and non-zero. Percentage and pages read will update each other.

Page count will be read-only in "Reading Now" so users can only update it in the "Books" screen. In "Add Books" I'll still get the page count from the source (if it has it) for convenience.

The thing is, you might have to allow duplicate books because of differing page numbers.

Not quite sure I get that? Each user has their own list of books, completely independent of other users. You can add any book, rename it to be unique (in your list) and update the page number to whatever you want.

[Bradles]

I've added Page Count and Pages Read attributes to PageBlaze.

The URL for the test site is: https://pageblazetest.azurewebsites.net

As suggested above:

• Page Count is imported from Marvel and Google where it exists
• Page Count can be added/updated in "Add/Edit Books"
• Pages Read can be updated in "Reading Now"
• Pages Read and Completed% update each other (where both exist)
• Pages Read and Page Count have been added to the "books" export (available for users with a verified email)

Note the following:

• Use the same login details to login to the test website
• The test website uses production data, so don't do anything destructive
• The test website has limited resources
• Page-related data entered in the test website should carry over to the production website when it's updated
• To update "Pages Read", click in the field first. Then update by typing a number, with keyboard arrow keys, or mouse-clicks on the "up/down" buttons.
  
  

  

  This ensures that the database is updated when the field loses focus (i.e. clicking/tabbing out of the field).

If there are no issues reported, I'll update the production website in a couple of days.
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[JSWolf]

Thanks. Quick question. If a book is already added, can I add the book again to make sure the data is correct?

[JSWolf]

Couple of issues.

1. I've not gotten an email replay so now way to verify my email address.
2. I see nothing doing with page numbers.

[Bradles]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Thanks. Quick question. If a book is already added, can I add the book again to make sure the data is correct?

No, that won't work as the book will be rejected as a duplicate (see Preventing Duplicates above.)

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Couple of issues.

1. I've not gotten an email replay so now way to verify my email address.
2. I see nothing doing with page numbers.

1. Your email address ends with .con. I assume that's a typo? I can correct that if you direct message me your correct address. I'll then resend the verification email.
2. Are you using the test website https://pageblazetest.azurewebsites.net? If so, maybe a refresh is needed Ctrl+F5.

PS: I'm officially a zealot! Not sure how I feel about that

[Bradles]

Update: It turns out that the user is a long-standing MobileRead forum user, who uses emails of that form to evaluate software. So, not dodgy. I've reached out by private message to apologise.

Someone's created a user with email address from+pageblaze (at) 14cmd.co.uk. This looks dodgy as heck so I've blocked it.

Don't respond (or even open) if you get an email from them.

PageBlaze official emails are PageBlaze.Support (at) warrilow-apps.click and and PageBlaze.Exports (at) warrilow-apps.click.