(no subject)

[rusty_halo]

Instead of a New Year's resolution, I made a website to-do list. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

I have no clue if I'll ever find the time to do any of these things, but they're all ideas that I would like to incorporate into my site.

Feedback would be useful--something like "Yes! Do that!" or "No! That's a waste of time!" or "That would be nice, but why not do [some cool idea that I haven't thought of]."

-Y'know how people are often making requests like "Can someone recommend Christmas fic?" or "Can someone recommend Fanged Four fic?", stuff like that? My site covers a lot of ways to search, but that's not one of them. So I'd like to have a new category, something like "Fiction by Theme." Possible topics would be Humor, various holidays (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, etc.), Fanged Four, etc. Whatever there seems to be a demand for, to make such types of stories easier to find. (I don't want to do "Fiction by Genre," because I'd find it impossible to classify every story into one or two genres, but "Fiction by Theme (or whatever)" seems possible.)

-List of beta readers--people can submit their names, experience, what they're good at reading for, what they'd prefer to (and not to) read, that kind of thing.

-New banner (same basic design, but different pictures)

-Updated code (combining repetitive elements, refining, etc.)

-Updated database structure (proper names for all tables)

-Move all design aspects to CSS

-Convert review system to use a database instead of flat files

-Updated search engine (to make sure it includes all stories)

-A new email program with which to send the daily email updates. The current one is kind of half-assed; overzealous spam-protectors often block emails to legitimate subscribers, and the increasing number of addresses on the list is starting to overload the weak little program.

-Author biographies or author Q&A's on author pages (optional for authors; might provide insight to readers)

-Update the links pages--get rid of dead links, add some new links

-Output all email addresses in unicode format to prevent spambots from harvesting addresses

Comments

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

I like the theme idea quite a lot. The technical aspects all sound like good ideas too, but the theme one jumps out at me as something I would definitely use in my perusals. Thanks again for running such a fab site!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :) That's probably the one that I'll look into first.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

I love the Themes idea. And as a massively egotistical person, the author bio idea's great too :p

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Hee. Thanks. I sort of worry that the author bio would annoy authors, but then, it's optional, and they can just ignore me if they don't want to do it. And the reason I want it is pretty selfish, too--I'm fascinated by the creative process, and would love to hear more about how my favorite authors go about it.

[buffyx.livejournal.com]

-Author biographies or author Q&A's on author pages (optional for authors; might provide insight to readers)

I really like the idea of a Q&A for authors-- there are many out there who I'd be really interested in hearing how they go about the process, their thoughts on fanfic in general, etc, etc.

The theme idea is interesting, too-- just a question: Would every fic on the site be filed under a theme, or just the ones that would fall into the major categories, like Holiday fics and Parodies and etc.? Because I could see it being difficult to sort every fic into a different theme. But I think it would also work if you just put the fics with obvious themes into theme categories. If that makes sense.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Would every fic on the site be filed under a theme, or just the ones that would fall into the major categories, like Holiday fics and Parodies and etc.?

I'd definitely just do the obvious ones. It would be a real pain to sort all of them, and doing so would end up watering down the results and making many of the categories useless. Plus, most stories are already covered under pre-existing categories anyway (like post-"Gift" or Spike/Xander or whatever).

[minim_calibre]

Go CSS!

Err. Not that I'm a zealot. Or, rather, I am a zealot, but a mostly-mild one.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. Nothing wrong with being a CSS zealot. :) I work as a web designer and do everything in CSS now. Unfortunately I wasn't quite so enlightened when I made All About Spike, and it's going to be a real pain to go back and rewrite all the code. I'm trying to figure out if it would be worth the effort--depends how long I want to keep updating the site, I suppose. (Which is sort of impossible to tell.)

[minim_calibre]

Same field we're in, then.

I work as a production monkey these days, which means I rarely get the chance to use the cursed knowledge. I miss playing with XML on a daily basis. (Same job title, same company at which I'm contracting, and yet, completely different job. Again. As usual.) On the plus side, this particular contract pays better, is with a better team, and is fairly low-stress. Also, as I'm not pushing crap .net based sites live to the Web, I feel less unclean at the end of the day.

None of my sites are high-traffic enough for me to have them database driven, so making them valid XHTML transitional* was an easy project.

*When I remember to slip them through Tidy to take care of my typos, that is.

Still tempted to do a ground-up redo of at least the personal archive.

[thisficklemob.livejournal.com]

-Output all email addresses in unicode format to prevent spambots from harvesting addresses

Sounds good, although I only know what unicode is by extrapolation. ;)

As for the beta reader thing, I think it's a good idea, but I've always been leery of making a general offer of beta-ing, because there are so many obstacles I could run into: I might have no idea how to help, they might not like my chatty comment style, their skill might be beyond my ability to criticize, I might like the pairing or subject matter, but dislike the philosophy... etc. It's a combination of shyness, snobbery, uselessness, and "I'm-not-worthy," really. I sort of think one has to not just like, but really get an author's work in order to beta for them. I know this would make a whole lot more work for you, (or someone), but maybe you could hold onto the betas' info, and then ask a a beta or two when an author asked you. That way a beta could look at the author's work and say yes or no without the author even knowing if they said no, and no hard feelings.

But that would probably be unworkable, as it would require someone to put a lot of time into playing matchmaker. Hm. Maybe authors could post that they wanted a beta, and the betas could answer? Dunno.

caia

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Hmm ... these are all important things to consider. Thank you for bringing them up.

I would like to find a way to bring together those who want to beta and those who need betas, but you're right, it's complicated--like a matchmaker service. The reason I'd like to do it is that I often find writers getting into fanfiction through my site; many of them are quite talented, but don't have a clue about the community and wouldn't know how to find a beta.

I'll have to think on this....

[thisficklemob.livejournal.com]

The reason I'd like to do it is that I often find writers getting into fanfiction through my site

That speaks very well of your site, btw.

Y'know, maybe you could make a LJ community for beta-ing... AAS_beta or something... people could post about their fic (rating, pairing, genre) and what they wanted help with (proof-reading, chartacterization, etc.). Then members could volunteer to beta. Or maybe it shouldn't be just an AAS thing, since you choose only what you want to post... is there a BtVS_beta community on LJ?

Also, even without community, LJ or otherwise, many people could probably find a beta among their RL or online friends... as long as they know somebody who's watched BtVS and has a good handle on language.

It's funny, I just realized none of the ficlets I've posted have been beta'd, and the only one I did have beta'd, I've yet to post. But I do beta for rabid1st, so it's not like I don't believe in beta-ing. Maybe it's that my pieces are all so short, or maybe it's that I'm unduly self-conscious and paralyzed by contradictory comments. Hrm.

caia

[thisficklemob.livejournal.com]

none of the ficlets I've posted have been beta'd

Actually, that's not true. I post something, and Rabid reads it and tells me I need to change a word or crop a sentence, and I do. So I guess it's like after the fact beta-ing.

caia

[shadowlass.livejournal.com]

I think several of those ideas are good--updating the links page, using the unicode format for email addresses, beta reader list, fic by theme. An updated search engine and new email program for updates sounds good, too.

I plead ignorance on things like CSS. :(

[witling.livejournal.com]

Wait, you don't use CSS? I've never looked. Because I am lame, and I leave all the under-the-hood stuff to people who know more. Which is, yeah, um, most everyone. But I'm sort of surprised that you don't use CSS for such a big site. What do you use instead?

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

I just use old-fashioned formatting tags (B, I, FONT, etc.) and tables for structure.

If I were using CSS, for example, instead of having <B> tags and <FONT>around the title of a story, I'd have something defining it as a story title. (Like <span class="storytitle"> or <p class ="storytitle">). Then I'd have one stylesheet where I could define all the formatting. So I could tell the title what font it should be, what size, what color, whether it should bold or italic, etc. Then if I wanted to change it, I'd only have to change it in that one stylesheet, instead of on every page of the site. Ideally this would be true for all formatting elements: horizontal lines, story text, author names, headings, chapter titles, etc.

Because my site runs on a database, it's not *that* essential for me to use CSS. My site actually has relatively few pages, for example; there is only one "fic.html" page, so if I want to change the way that's formatted, I can do it in one place. The story information is all contained separately, with minimal formatting, in a database; the page pulls the story from the database based on which story number you put in the URL. But CSS would speed this process even further, make sitewide formatting changes ultra-simple, and offer more versatility (it has more formatting options and variations).

Um, hope that makes sense. Basically my site is set up the old-fashioned way, where content and formatting are mixed together. CSS would separate the two.

[witling.livejournal.com]

Hm. Yeah, I've just never looked at the tagging. You know all those format tags are deprecated, right? Yeah, I know you do. You're, like, smart and stuff. With the dynamics and the scripting and all that. And, cool. Yeah. Databases. Cool.

::scurries back to spider hole::

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

LOL.

Yup, they're deprecated, but they'll still be supported for a long time. (As long as people keep wanting to look at old websites whose owners haven't upgraded, anyway, which I think will be quite a while).

[witling.livejournal.com]

Thank God for that.

::casts shamefaced look back at Coquette's lame, lame, extremely lame site::

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

casts shamefaced look back at Coquette's lame, lame, extremely lame site

Oh, please. There are much worse sites out there. Besides, that's one of those places where the content is worth wading through any design problems, anyway. :)

[witling.livejournal.com]

Aw, man. So sweet!

I should clean that sucker up, but that would mean revisiting the content, too...

Blargh.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot to add: CSS doesn't necessarily separate design and content. When used poorly, it can make the two even more interwoven and make code even messier. (When more recent versions of MS Word generate CSS, the result is beyond horrifying; it's a really nasty mutation of what CSS is supposed to be, used for all the wrong purposes). But CSS has the potential to be much neater than old-fashioned formatting. (If you look at Peasant's code, for example, she uses CSS really well.)

[witling.livejournal.com]

Heee! She'll be so pleased to know you think so. She's such a little codemonkey.

And yeah, I occasionally teach a CSS class. I just don't use it. Because I'm lazy and lame and all I ever do anymore is play on LJ.

Play, play, play. La!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

I occasionally teach a CSS class

LOL, but you leave under-the-hood stuff to other people? Now I feel like an idiot. Sorry for getting all lectury; you know what I mean already.

But there are still plenty of people out there who don't use CSS at all. I wonder what the statistics are--I'd guess that the majority of websites still don't use it extensively.

[witling.livejournal.com]

No, no! The lecturey stuff is good! And I need to be smacked around a little for not using it myself anymore--the only web stuff I do these days is for work, and I just use Dreamweaver and the in-house CSS and basically sleep at the wheel. It's bad. My web skills are getting a big ass. They need to be taken out and walked around the lake a little bit.

And yeah, it's funny, I don't think a lot of sites do use CSS yet, which is weird when you consider how cool a concept it is. It's very hard to explain to brand-new web publishers (who are the folks I teach) why they should separate form from content in the first place. They want to use and and and all that stuff, because it's fun! Funny fun fun! And I don't blame them. I agree, it's fun, and it's instant gratification, and centering stuff using CSS is a huge pain in the ass. But still. Overall, it's good.

So anyway, we're trying to breed CSS-users here. Or at least, CSS-understanders. It's going...well, uh, since I'm the teacher and I don't use or understand them all that well...I'd say, fair to middling.

Yeah.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Man, you sound just like my coworker and I when we decided that we were officially more technically competent than our boss. We basically ordered him to stop using Dreamweaver because he kept going in to update little things on our sites and messing up all the code by opening and saving files in DreamWeaver. That was a good battle to win, though; our sites are so infinitely better now that we're using CSS and pretty much hand-coding everything. It opens up so many possibilities.

It is *really* hard to explain it to someone who is used to old style HTML, though. CSS is not really intuitive; it's easier in the short-term to just put the formatting right in there. It took me a while to understand, too: you have to look at the long-term benefits, which greatly exceed the short-term convenience.

(Oh, um, and LJ automatically tries to use HTML brackets; you have to encode them to get them to show up. Like, I used & l t ; and & g t ; --minus the spaces--to make < and >.)

[witling.livejournal.com]

Heeeeeee! I'm an idiot today. And also sort of working on automatic pilot. Sorry for making your eyes bleed like that.

And, ahem, yes. CSS good.

[witling.livejournal.com]

And I also meant to say, the librarian in me likes the "themes" search very much. I think it would be very useful to a lot of people.

And the reader in me also likes the idea of author bios and Q&As. And interviews! Salon-style table-talk interviews about people's writing! And digital video! Of writers typing, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, looking grim and tortured!

Okay, maybe no. But I like your ideas a lot.

[octopedingenue]

I second (third? fifth?) the "themes" search. I know I had a time looking for Christmas fiction on AAS around that time of year, and, oh, scary fiction around Halloween, and being able to search specifically for it would be a great help.

And though I realize it might be too time-consuming and logistically confusing, I too love the idea of an interview section. That was one of my favorite aspects of the now-defunct The Darker Side of Sunnydale, and I was disappointed that more interviews weren't added before the site closed for updates.

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

These all sound good (especially the ones I don't understand). What I would like rid of is the porn pop-up I get every time I visit a page on your site. I don't know if it's just something evil little worm I pick up, but it's really frustrating.

I would also like to take this oppotunity to say that I love the print versions of all the stories. Saves me hours sometimes.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

What I would like rid of is the porn pop-up I get every time I visit a page on your site. I don't know if it's just something evil little worm I pick up, but it's really frustrating.

That's so weird. I've honestly never heard anyone else report this, so I haven't a clue what's causing it. I wish I could help, but all I can think is that it's adware or something that downloaded itself to your computer from somewhere else.

I would also like to take this oppotunity to say that I love the print versions of all the stories. Saves me hours sometimes.

Thanks. :) I'm glad to know that people use them.

[bogwitch.livejournal.com]

but all I can think is that it's adware

That's what I think too (I'm having some other problems too - damn boyfriend!), but this is the only site it does it on. Weird.

[mezzibelle.livejournal.com]

It all sounds good, but I especially like the idea of a beta list.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I think they all sound great -- and I think CSS is cascading style sheets, right? Heee... as if I know anything about that. Asfor author bios, if people don't want to, they can certainly decline-- it's just an option you're providing (kindly). And I think others have outlined the beta issues, but it's a sound idea in that a lot of people don't know how to find one, let alone one who might be able to help them with the specific things they need help on.

[abbylee]

My response keeps on getting too long. I wish I could find you on AIM to chat :(

My suggestion is to start with the database, then do the coding, and then move to css. It will just make everything else easier in the long run, because once you're done, if you get a new idea, you're much more likely to only need to change one line in one files as opposed to thirty in each of twelve.

I'd love to see an advanced (database-driven) search engine, where I could enter in the pairing, the time, and a keyword, to find that story I forgot about. But having no idea how you have things set up under the hood, I have no idea if that's ridiculously complicated. But I suspect I have a searching fetish when it comes to archive sites ;)

If I continue, I'll just sound greedy. I think it's the problem with me actually trusting you to do a good job, I just want everying possible. Like logins for reviews. (Which could help you to automate the author Q&As and beta lists and eliminate the drive-by spamming, I'm not being totally selfish.)

[elizard100.livejournal.com]

See Laura, that's what I like about you. Your list is "Things to do with More About Spike". Most people would make a list of "Things I'd like to do TO Spike". LOL.

Happy New Year.

[spikewriter]

The theme idea is a good one -- and I second the comments about keeping the categories broad and not watering them down too much.

Code and design issues I will definitely leave to you as you are far more experienced in this area than I am and I definitely trust your judgement there. As I've said before, your site is one of the cleanest and easiest to read I've come across for fic.

Like the idea of the bio for authors; it's nice to know something about the person who's writing the story you're reading.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

I love the theme idea. Maybe post-apocalypse as one.
Thanks for all your hard work on the site.

[rahirah]

The theme thing would be neefty. I just barely understand CSS, so I bow out of the rest of the discussion before I make myself look really dorky...