Cleaning up accounts

[gwyn]

I apologize to the people who are subscribed to me on AO3 for all the postings that have come up of old stories, and will continue for a little while. My ISP seems to have been taken over by new people, who are now charging for the piddly web space I've been using since the '90s to host my fic. I'll be damned if I'm going to keep paying them for this, so I'm beginning the slow process of moving all my old fic, and in time changing my email address (which will be hard, since everything is linked to me at this space, and I've had this email for centuries). I never thought there'd be people subscribed to me at the archive, but apparently there are.

I'm really sad about this. Part of it's that I have inertia, part of it is that I'm lazy, part of it is a lot of other things: I hate the AO3 interface and have yet to find a skin that isn't butt-ugly or completely incomprehensible to me (and I hate the way the one I have squeezes my icon), though now that you can list things alphabetically and it ignores articles like the and an, that's a slight step forward; I can't stand that my lovely cover art from people like X can't be posted with/on my fic; and it's just hard to let go of something I've had for most of my fannish life.

But I've been paying a lot for the vids hosting site, and figure I might as well use the domain I pay for to have all my stuff in one place. It seems like a waste of time to even have somewhere to post things. If I was sensible I'd probably just take it all down and go with YouTube or Vimeo and AO3. Not sure why I'm not, other than that I have always liked seeing people's fannish spaces, and there's absolutely nothing about any of these other places that feel like "mine."

Oh, and I guess this is where I say if there are any old stories you wanted to keep from the web site, get 'em now. I think I'll get everything up to AO3, but I can't guarantee it. I can't even remember most of the stuff I've written.

Anyway, at some point I will catch up to all these things being posted. I'm only partway through the X-FIles stuff, and I still have all my Buffy crap to go. There is a LOT of fic, a lot of huge stuff there since I have such a tendency to write long. And a lot of them won't post in the importer, so I have to do everything by hand. Bleh.

I hate change. Change is bad.

Comments

[kass]

I'm selfishly glad you're migrating stuff to the AO3; it's my favorite place to find stuff. (And I was actually just trying to remember your URL tonight and spacing on it.) Anyway: having all of your stuff there will be grand for me. So thank you. *grin*

[elynross]

You can't upload the images themselves to the archive, but you can embed them if they're hosted elsewhere, so you could possibly upload them to a free site, or ask the original artists if they'd host them, or get space just for the images with a friend, and then embed them with the stories.

[montanaharper]

I'm totally willing to help you get your fic moved over, if you need it. Also, as an addendum to what elyn said, I've got a ton of webspace and I'd have no problem with slapping up a folder of images for you so that you could link art to stories.

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if this would help, but you can embed your cover art just like you'd embed any other image (as long as it's hosted somewhere), like I did here (http://archiveofourown.org/works/364323); it won't show up on the search page or anything, but at least you can see it once you click on the story?

I am a huge fan of AO3 as a reader--I LOVE having so many different fandoms in one place, and being able to download into ebook format is GOLD to me--but I have not yet tackled uploading all my old fic to it. I keep meaning to! But I have not. SO MUCH WORK. So I feel you there.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I guess I'll have to have someone show me where/how to put the graphics up. I barely figured it out the first time, and I think someone else did it, in fact. I'm hopeless. But it's good to know we can add a graphic now.

I like that there are all kinds of things you can do with the archive. I just...loathe how it looks. The skins are just all so ugly, and even the colors are ones that make me ill. I have the same problem with Dreamwidth, although they're slowly getting to where they have some less clunky and ugly interfaces.

[brynnmck.livejournal.com]

I just uploaded the picture to my LJ scrapbook for hosting, and then I used HTML to post the image; I put it right in the Notes (at the beginning) box, and it looks like this (replace [ ] with < >, and "http://yourimageURL" with the actual location of your image):

[img src="http://yourimageURL" width="450" border="0"]

You can resize the image by changing the width measurement (it's in pixels), or replacing it with height="#pixels"

At least I think that should work! I know VERY little HTML, but that seemed to work for me. And obviously if you'd rather upload your images to your own website or Photobucket or whatever, that would work just as well.

Also I love your icon. <33333 We should try to find a time for some Mag7 at some point!

[varina8.livejournal.com]

I actually enjoy seeing people's old work come into the archive. It gives me a chance to rediscover old favorites.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

It's so weird, though -- there are times I'm porting a story over and I have literally NO IDEA what the hell the story was about, so I can't add tags. And I don't have the inclination to read through it all (most of them are so loooong) to find out! I have sometimes completely forgotten I wrote something, and when I come across a really cool passage somewhere, I'll be "wow, that's really clever writing, I wonder where that came from?" and then I'm all, oh snap, I wrote that.

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

Thank you for letting us know! I'm grabbing all your M7 stuff and Buffy/Spike stuff JUST IN CASE. :D

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I think I have everything over except the last couple pieces...I *think.* The problem is that I have forgotten so much of what I've written that I can't be sure. I've tried to find the things I didn't post to my site as well, but I can't remember where they are.

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

Something I realized when I was saving all your fic: you have the best titles. I have title envy!

[slavelabour.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you're archiving stuff! I see brynnmck already schooled you in posting graphics. There's a ton of fanart on AO3 now! My own acct is half fic and half fanart. Over the holidays I posted my first fic/fanart together, and someday I'd like to be able to post various graphics inside the fic like this Justified fic (http://archiveofourown.org/works/546509/chapters/972792). I would loooove to see X's art on your fic! She's half the reason I wanted to learn how to fanart at all, so getting her art on your fic is pretty cool. :)

IIRC you could use an external CSS style sheet so your AO3 account ends up looking like a web page, but I don't know if that's still possible. And if it is possible I think readers can still turn your style off. I think one of the big aims of the archive was to make every story legible so authors were not posting fic in lime green 8 font on a black background.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha ha...OK so your second paragraph? Reads to me like "blah blah AO3 blah blah web page." THAT's how inept I am about this tuff, which is why I'm so frustrated with the stuff on AO3. There are all these skins that say customizable but it might as well be in Mandarin. I think a lot of the people who've set things up over there thing that everyone is as ept as they are, and they don't understand how little some of us grok this stuff.

[franzeska]

Ha ha. Basically, a user can make their own skin, but other users can choose not to see it (like style=mine on LJ). So it's still not like when everyone had personal sites that actually seemed personal. On the upside, you don't get stuck with every single person's differently terrible design sense though.

I dream of a day when DW and AO3 have the number of active skin-creators there are on LJ. Customizable or not, I'd rather just use somebody's prefab skin that I already like.

[dailyalice.livejournal.com]

[Er, hi. I feel like I"m de-lurking here. Eep.]

I wouldn't worry about spamming folks. I think I may have subscribed to you on AO3 when I found your account there, despite there not being much fic or anything, just in hope that one day there would be. Given the supreme awesomeness of the FanFictionDownloader plug-in for Calibre and how well it works with AO3 (downloading not just the fic, but also all useful metadata), I by far prefer reading fic that I grab from AO3-- then I read the fic on iPad or Kindle or whatever. So whenever I see fic I like, I tend to look and see if it or other stories by an author I like are on AO3 and if they aren't but they have some sort of presence there, I'll subscribe in hope that one day they'll put their stuff there.

So, anyway, I imagine there are others like me who saw the updates and thought "yay, now it's easy for me to grab all her fic to read and/or archive!"

I'm surprised there aren't more and better skins for AO3, but I haven't looked lately. I know I tweaked one mildly early on that works for me, but most of the time I'm only there to search for fic and then I download anything I want to read.

I know someone remarked somewhere that there's a way to indicate art is cover art on AO3, but at a glance I'm not seeing it. The Calibre Fanfic plug-in can grab any images in fic and can be set to assume the first image is cover art, which works great much of the time. (Sometimes if people have moved fic over from LJ or someplace and they include userhead icons, I'll wind up with a userhead as cover art! Aiee! There are ways to fix that, thank goodness.)

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad maybe there are at least a couple folks who aren't annoyed by being spammed by uploading notifications. I mean, christ, I can't believe how much stuff I've posted there in the past month!

For me, who can't tweak a skin, it's a frustrating experience. I have synesthesia, as well, and I have really strong physical responses to certain colors -- the red that both AO3 and Dreamwidth use literally make me queasy. It has a taste, and it's not a good taste, I despise that color and I can't get rid of it completely. And the skins are either ugly or they do things I don't understand.

I think there's sometimes a disconnect -- there are all these competent people out there who understand customizations and such, and there are people like me, who poke things with sticks and grunt and are easily confused. Unfortunately the competent people set things up for other competent folks, and those of us with sticks are stuck.

I know I need to download Calibre, but I'm intimidated by it so I've avoided it for a while. I guess that will be my next big project.

Oh, and, uh, HI!!!