(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

[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).