Smallweb Chatter Post

[kalloway]

This is an open post for chatter and showing off what you're working on/just finished/etc. Joy and frustration are equally welcome.

Comments

[taichara]

I am simultaneously glad I got loneknight up and running (and away from WordPress) and working on a new post, and feeling low as grubs over having not posted on smol.pub in what feels like and is probably ages. DX

Even though I'm technically~ only "one post behind" because I haven't been writing any fiction at all, and only one new post is up on Lone Knight since a small nexus already had the Lindwyrm stuff --

Blrghl. *slowly tips over*

[kalloway]

I am mostly sitting over here incredibly amused that my solution for my personal fiction site might be the exact opposite of what would work best on, oh, AO3. (I mean, the reason the opposite might work best is because it's a personal site, but I still find this dreadfully funny.)

[enchantedsleeper]

When you say "what would work best", do you mean in terms of sorting and categorising? Or something else?

[enchantedsleeper]

I have a small personal fanworks archive that I've been working on since July last year, so, coming up to a year since I started making it. I feel very pleased with my work on it so far, but at the same time frustrated at how slowly things are progressing ^^; I have bursts of working on it, and I always enjoy it and love archiving my old stuff. At the same time, I've only managed to put up a fraction of my works so far, and I still have a lot of improvements I want to make to the design and layout of the site.

I should try to make time on a regular basis for archiving, but then, there are a lot of things I need to make time for regularly ^^;

[kalloway]

This sounds a lot like how I feel/how I've been working on my own site. There's just so much to do, isn't there? I'm trying not to feel intimidated by it. (And also 'done' is good, 'perfect' can come later.)

I've been trying to do a little bit every weekend, but it's honestly generally a very little bit. ^^;;

[kalloway]

Yeah, sorting and organizing. Basically, on a large multifandom, multi-user archive, I'd want certain franchises/meta-fandoms split differently than on a personal site where I can just type a short paragraph about why things are combined/separated/sorted/you can find x over y.

[kalloway]

Maybe just pick a day/time/mushroom moment to 'catch up'?

[taichara]

Yeah, I kind of just stared at it end of week and I think I caught it up yesterday ...

[kalloway]

That's kind of going to be my plan once I finally get the big archiving done. Just pick a day and catch up, or something... Hopefully maybe, lol. <3

[enchantedsleeper]

Yes, absolutely! I'm telling myself not to be perfectionist because it's just a fun little site and people won't care if it's janky.

It's nice to get stuck in for a good website session, but I should probably aim for "little and often" because I'd get a lot more done xD

Once I get back into the swing of things, it's really easy to keep coming back to it, but when I've been busy, I get out of the habit.

[enchantedsleeper]

That makes total sense ^^ I also really like that freedom of sorting! Before I made my site, I saw someone posting about theirs and going "oh hey, I can make up my own sorting system" and that was one of the things that nudged me towards making my own personal fanworks archive. You can arrange things however you like!

[enchantedsleeper]

(I'm still debating things like whether I want to split Fantastic Beasts off from Harry Potter and how I want to arrange Marvel - it comes down to number of fanworks more than anything. If I've only got a couple of works for something, I'm more likely to fold it into a bigger fandom than split it off.

I was debating lumping all my Yuletide works together as a set, but then I realised that almost all of them are for fandoms I've written for elsewhere, so they can sit in bigger categories with the exception of one!)

[fred_mouse]

I have a neocities at https://fredmouse.neocities.org/ that has bugger all there; I have more in drafts in an R project, which I really should spend some time working on. I have this half-arsed hope that I can get myself some kind of github autopost or some linking via the neocities API, and those are both Thing I Need To Learn, which are holding me up

[kalloway]

It's a start!

Any thoughts on how you're going to catalog reviews?

[kalloway]

Yeah, my general goal is 'readable on desktop, readable on mobile', but it's certainly not all fancy and responsive to screen size beyond what browsers automatically do. ^^;;

Here's to both of us doing little bits when we can~

[kalloway]

(Yeah, I have, like, Transformers on one hand, and a lot of Gundam on another... But the nice thing is that if I get it all done and realize it doesn't work, or if I want to split it off later, it's just a new page and copy-pasting some HTML over and changing a couple links. It's... not that big a deal, really.)

[fred_mouse]

That is also on the list of WTF, how does that even work. I think that each one will be an individual file, and that I'll have some kind of interesting scripting that assembles them into specific files. Possibly something xml based. Although if that is the case then I really should consider having the review in the file, although then I get to the how to index and how to have paragraphs and and and and. I have so many tabs open to read and think about!

[kalloway]

I ran into this problem a couple of decades ago, when I was still doing music reviews. IIRC I never hit upon a perfect solution (actually, I think I had frames, which never, never again!) so I'm always curious how other people will solve review sites.

[fred_mouse]

I have already discarded the idea of iframes. I am, however, contemplating that writing scripts to do boring things like assemble pages the way I want them is something I can do. So, having a master file in xml or csv and then using that as the basis of building pages. So, for example, If I have a column for 'primary author name' and then can generate pages for sets of letters (eventually some letters will have own pages, but, say i-j might only have five between them and that is fine for one page). Similarly, I can have a separate page for the awards, whereby I have columns of year, category, award, work, and then those can be used to assemble the relevant pages. I don't know if I have the web based knowledge to get suitable filters, but I do have the back end ability to just generate All! The! Pages! algorithmically, and assume that I've got it right.

And then I'm going to have to find a show/hide that works. But that is not for now.

[enchantedsleeper]

I get that! I'm always telling myself that I can just change things around later if I want to.

I also had the crucial revelation the other day that - wait for it - I can link a fic page from multiple places. *galaxy brain image* So I can put something in both a Yuletide section and a fandom section if I want to!

Very excited to sort my fics now xD

[kalloway]

Ha! I had this beautiful revelation recently, too, though mine was in relation to crossovers. On my old site, I just had a page for crossovers but... I can actually just... link them from both pages. Ha!