Fiction in the Cloud
So, I'm not sure if all of you know it, but I'm a little bit of a code monkey. Since I've started getting paid to write code I've written less of it for fun, but I've had a code bunny (close cousin of the fic bunny, and no less insistent) nibbling at my toes for awhile now and I've finally given in. Some of you may have seen my old-school fiction formatter, which is what I have always used when posting my own fiction, and I get hits here and there from other people but it was mostly designed for me.
Now's your chance to help me bring ficwriting into the 21st century!
I've started working on an app at http://fictex.appspot.com/ for composing stories in the cloud. It's still a bit rough, but even at this stage it has some pretty sweet features: all of your stories are just a single click away wherever/whenever inspiration strikes you, it autosaves for you every time you hit enter or finish a sentence with a period, and it shows you a live preview of what you're typing. The live preview isn't particularly interesting except that it lets you bold things by surrounding them with asterisks and similarly for underline with an underscore and italics with slashes. Blank lines separate paragraphs, multiple dashes are replaced with the REAL dashes (which makes the pedant in me happy), and dividers are made with "-----". You can provide people links to your fic as you're writing it, and you can easily the HTML source to paste it into LJ. I have been working on the metadata aspect of it, so that you can add things other than title, rating, fandom, etc, but that part's still rough and it doesn't give you an easy way to copy the HTML for it quite yet (this is something I'm looking for feedback and ideas about), though it will show up nicely formatted (but in an arbitrary order) at the top of the "reading" pages.
I have lots of ideas for it, and I'm sure some will never happen, so suggestions from potential users helps prioritize a lot. I want to add the ability to create chapters (basically a single story with multiple sub-stories), ways for your betas to add comments directly on the fic, more output styles than just HTML (like real lj-cuts and stuff), and things like privacy options/sharing.
It works great in Chrome, and it should work well in Firefox and Safari too. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I don't have IE on any of my computers, so I can't say how that particular browser will deal with it.
Feel free to drop me a PM (or comment) if you have suggestions! Share it far and wide, pimp your stories, try it out, and let me know when you run into the inevitable snags. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of reading stories from a lot of you on and off over the past few years, so I want to try to use my skills to give something back to all of you :).
Try it for yourself: http://fictex.appspot.com/ (it uses gmail/google accounts so it can save your stories)
Now's your chance to help me bring ficwriting into the 21st century!
I've started working on an app at http://fictex.appspot.com/ for composing stories in the cloud. It's still a bit rough, but even at this stage it has some pretty sweet features: all of your stories are just a single click away wherever/whenever inspiration strikes you, it autosaves for you every time you hit enter or finish a sentence with a period, and it shows you a live preview of what you're typing. The live preview isn't particularly interesting except that it lets you bold things by surrounding them with asterisks and similarly for underline with an underscore and italics with slashes. Blank lines separate paragraphs, multiple dashes are replaced with the REAL dashes (which makes the pedant in me happy), and dividers are made with "-----". You can provide people links to your fic as you're writing it, and you can easily the HTML source to paste it into LJ. I have been working on the metadata aspect of it, so that you can add things other than title, rating, fandom, etc, but that part's still rough and it doesn't give you an easy way to copy the HTML for it quite yet (this is something I'm looking for feedback and ideas about), though it will show up nicely formatted (but in an arbitrary order) at the top of the "reading" pages.
I have lots of ideas for it, and I'm sure some will never happen, so suggestions from potential users helps prioritize a lot. I want to add the ability to create chapters (basically a single story with multiple sub-stories), ways for your betas to add comments directly on the fic, more output styles than just HTML (like real lj-cuts and stuff), and things like privacy options/sharing.
It works great in Chrome, and it should work well in Firefox and Safari too. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I don't have IE on any of my computers, so I can't say how that particular browser will deal with it.
Feel free to drop me a PM (or comment) if you have suggestions! Share it far and wide, pimp your stories, try it out, and let me know when you run into the inevitable snags. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of reading stories from a lot of you on and off over the past few years, so I want to try to use my skills to give something back to all of you :).
Try it for yourself: http://fictex.appspot.com/ (it uses gmail/google accounts so it can save your stories)