Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses

[antennapedia]

This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day

Comments

[the_emu]

Yes, with exclamation marks

PS, mind if I link?

[the_emu]

PS, mind if I link?

Re: PS, mind if I link?

[antennapedia]

Link away! I'm completely interested in other people's thinking on this topic.

Re: PS, mind if I link?

[the_emu]

Done. Thank you. You've got me thinking more and more.

I'm not sure about asking-to-link etiquette. I may have to post musingly on that, at some stage. ~g~

8^-

Re: PS, mind if I link?

[antennapedia]

I'm not used to being asked for permission, and I really wouldn't think to ask it, 'cause the idea is kinda weird. The web is built on the concept of linking from one piece of content to another; hence the metaphor of the name. Pages that aren't linked don't exist.

Re: PS, mind if I link?

[the_emu]

I find the idea kind of stupid for the same reason. And because there are certain types of post (like this one) that are clearly addressed to a wider audience.

But so many people do it these days, that I'm starting to think I missed a link to Miss Manners, or something.

8^-

Re: PS, mind if I link?

[tiferet]

As one of the proponents of "ask to link" I think that the comments pages are what makes the difference. Granted it's possible to lock and filter posts, but sometimes life just doesn't allow you to deal with thousands of comments, particularly if you're a troll attractor.

[quivo]

Just dropping in my two cents on mobile ways to read fic. My bets as far as ebook reading are on the Kindle and (PERHAPS, if someone makes the software) on the iPhone and their successors. The Kindle is most likely the more difficult route to take as far as content goes: if I want anything on it that's not in the Kindle store, I have to look for it and work to put it on there. But when it's on there, it looks damn great. The iPhone is equally nebulous as far as content and reading experience go-- how its ebook reader (if any) is built will dictate what formats it will accept, and I've spent enough hours hunched over that bright screen to understand the merits of e-paper and big fat next buttons on the side :P

[antennapedia]

When I noticed you'd friended me yesterday, I read your pages on pdf generation and content generation for the Kindle. I started playing with some pdf-building software for Ruby for my own story archive maintenance tool. (Long story short, I just started writing this, because I got sick of relinking in-sequence files by hand, and I am supremely lazy.) Why not generate a for-offline-reading version of each story? The tricky part will be coming up with a format that's simple enough

[quivo]

The tricky part will be coming up with a format that's simple enough.
This is why I try to save a copy of everything in HTML if possible. Pdfs are pretty, but it is tongue-gnawingly hard to get readable content out of them even if they're tagged and OCRed and all the rest of it. HTML is editable with text editors and printable if you have a web browser and some CSS knowhow, and it can already show up in most browsers.

I got sick of relinking in-sequence files by hand, and I am supremely lazyGod, the AMOUNT OF WORK that goes into ebooks :(. I forsee only treasured fics making the conversion leap through my hands at first-- I was lucky that the fic I tried my hands at was in Markdown already, and thus easily convertible into standards-compliant html. Mobipocket creator doesn't explicitly choke on bad html, it just ends up looking like shit, in subtle ways that my OCD brain cannot tolerate. And then there are all the special characters that neglect to be in Unicode when I download the html files *sighs*. I'm just glad I still had

[antennapedia]

Side comment: I remain stunned that more fans haven't adopted Markdown as their writing format of choice. It has a number of advantages:
- simple to write
- can be pasted directly into email
- is easily turned into simple, clean html that's 1000x better than what Word produces
- is directly supported by a number of good, cheap text editors (I use BBEdit, but TextMate is great here too)

"Coding" a story to post is something that takes me about 2 seconds.

[quivo]

I think it's a mixture of people remaining unaware of more human-readable markup languages and people being scared that using a lang like that would be complicated. I know I was leery of markdown before I actually tried using it, and what pushed me to actually try was how annoying it was to convert stories written in Scrivener (a great writing program which I was using then) to html format without it getting borked up. Oh, and owning Textmate certainly helped-- syntax coloring is totally ftw, and I get itchy when there's none of it.

Another reason I bothered with Textmate and markdown is that I was writing very long pieces at the time, and "coding" them by hand would have been a full-blown nightmare. I don't know how anyone that writes longer pieces manages by hand *shivers*

[treewishes]

And fandom will, from my point of view, be behind the adoption curve on all of it. But then, I love my gadgets.

I was just thinking the opposite! In terms of social networking, fandom jumped way ahead of the curve and embraced comments in ways that blogging is only now moving toward. Fans bought e-readers before they were any good, and now that we're finally getting e-readers like Kindle and iPhone*, we're moving on to podfic. Yes, of course, there are levels and not every fan is at the bleeding edge, but I see a trend.

I see a day coming soon where we'll be able to put skins on SIMS and make them act out our stories. Just wait...

*and my Treo, which has been serving me portable fic for years.