A poll on title formatting
Time to re-format all my titles! I tried to read some fic this morning, and then I realized I can't until I have this formatting thing nailed down. Which means I probably won't be able to read fic for another week. Dammit.
ETA: Again, dammit. In the last option of the first question, assume that "by cherryice" appears right before "(fic: Heroes ( Read more... )
ETA: Again, dammit. In the last option of the first question, assume that "by cherryice" appears right before "(fic: Heroes ( Read more... )
I rather like to imagine that I'm in a store filled with shelves upon shelves of identical brown boxes. What should be on those boxes to tell me what's in them? There's still what's on the spine vs. what's on the front of the box, but what needs to be on the spine to grab my attention? Title and author isn't going to be enough for me, I don't think.
That all said: I probably DO have too much information up there. Right now, most of my posts look like this:
Title of Fic by author (character; rating) [wordcount]
Which I think is reasonably scannable, actually, but I'm not sure it's the right information. I think I read del.icio.us a little differently that most people, in that I spend very little time on the site itself. Generally my various feeds get dumped into my RSS reader (my network and other tag subscriptions), which shows me a big list of post titles. I find it nearly impossible to skim the tags through that interface, so I'm basically trying to format my titles with the information I wish everyone would include.
Which STILL means I probably have too much information. Rating I actually am thinking of just leaving in tags, because I don't care that much. Resource type is still iffy, because right now the only thing I'm tagging is fic, so I don't necessarily need it to say 'fic.' Of course it's fic. But when that changes, I'm probably going to want to add it. Pairing I flat-out refuse to get rid of, because it's important to me. It's definitely more important than title, since titles so rarely say anything about a story and I never remember them and I'm crap at titling my own fic. Authors... are kind of iffy for me. I won't NOT read a story if I haven't heard of the author, because I read in a ton of fandoms and if I only read people I knew, I would never read anything. But I might decide to read a pairing I don't normally read if it's by an author I really love, so. Pairing and author, indispensable. Other people care about titles, so again, indispensable.
But all that stuff about pairing also kind of applies to fandoms. If it's a small fandom, I don't much care about pairing (and I might not recognize their names? Esp. if they're not unique. Like, what the hell is John/Andy? Useless without a fandom attached). So. That's why I am trying to add fandom into my titles. The rest of the stuff (okay, so all that's left is resource type, rating and wordcount) can probably go. Although I like wordcount, because sometimes I just can't handle a long fic, and sometimes I want to read something short, and I don't like to tag for that stuff because I don't know how to break length out into categories that are useful.
Right. I have talked in many circles, and have not actually said anything. Sweet.
Reply
1. Can your feeder use color? Fic is pink and meta is blue, vid is orange and news is boring brown.
2. I think I once came across a reader that could shorten/modify link names. The programming went like "start at "special symbol" end at "special symbol." With this, you could just hide the stuff you don't want to see for yourself. - This option may not be for real, however.
Reply
Leave a comment