i read dead russian authors volumes at a time
Because it's something I've been grappling with for a while myself, I got curious about how other people save and store the fanfiction they read (or intend to read), either on- or offline. And since I just re-upped my paid time on dreamwidth, it looks like conditions are perfect for a poll! For these purposes, when I talk about "saving a story", I mean "putting it (or a link to it) in any physical, digital, or virtual space for your own personal access at a later date, for any reason". So:
View poll: Your personal fanfiction curation habits: describe them to me!
Obviously this poll is limited to my own experiences and knowledge, so I would dearly love to hear about the practices that work for you. Or practices that are no longer working for you! There's also the fact that I myself am exclusively a reader and not a writer of fanfiction. If you're a writer, does that affect your archiving habits? Do you handle your own fic differently? What about saving other fannish works, like art and podfic and vids and meta? I'm especially unfamiliar with fanart communities and their homes on the web, and with vids I very quickly run into the problem of limited disk space. So what do you do?
Here's how my current system is set up: every story I read that I ever want to lay my hands on again, I a) save in html format to my laptop (which subsequently gets backed up to an external drive) and b) bookmark in my delicious account. It's important to me to have both, since anything can disappear from the internet at any moment (sites go down, links break, C&D letters are served, authors pull their work, etc.), but a library in the cloud is, by definition and design, accessible a) to anyone b) from anywhere. Thus, in a perfect world I would have a perfectly redundant system consisting of local, offline electronic copies and the corresponding referral links to the online versions of those stories.
But (spoiler!) it isn't a perfect world, and this is how things actually shake out:
As of this moment I have approximately 7,700 stories saved to my hard drive (and backed up on an external drive), a number that wildly underrepresents the amount of fanfiction I have actually read, even just counting the stuff I have read and loved. I first discovered "fandom" and fanfiction via Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the summer of 1998 and read exclusively and extensively in it (Buffy/Angel omg! and AOL! and web rings!) until 2001. And yet I only have, let me count . . . ONE Buffy story saved to my hard drive, and it was posted three months ago. At the time, I kept browser bookmarks of my favorite sites in my AOL account, but that was on my parents' computer, and they were lost to the ether when that machine failed. In the meantime, I had gone off to college with my own computer.
I first started saving stories some time toward the end of 2002, well after I'd discovered (simultaneously) Smallville and slash and livejournal (and fandom again, but for real this time), but I didn't have a saving policy, something helpful and exhaustive like "save every story that you might ever want to lay your hands on again". Over the next couple of years I read what probably amounted to thousands of stories across a whole bunch of fandoms (especially Smallville, popslash, Sports Night, Highlander, Due South, The Sentinel, Lotrips, and Harry Potter), but I saved a vanishingly small percentage of it all. During the summer of 2002 I tore through the entire (now defunct) Our Boys Sorkinfic archive but saved zero stories from it. As of one month ago (I've since had a renaissance!), I had only nine Highlander stories saved. NINE. I started saving scrupulously (using the above-mentioned policy) somewhere in or around 2004, when I was into Harry Potter for at least the second time around (the Remus/Sirius redux), Star Trek (TOS), and M*A*S*H.
By the end of 2005 (SGA, et al.) I had created my delicious account, and by early 2006 I was using it in fits and starts; it wasn't until three years later, in January of 2009 (Merlin), that I began bookmarking scrupulously-that is, bookmarking every story I saved. I have approximately 3,200 stories bookmarked there now, less than half the number of stories I have saved offline; but I have another couple of thousand unread stories bookmarked, to keep my number of open browser tabs to a minimum, and for rainy days.
At this point I don't know if I'm ever going to attempt to gather all those stories I read but never saved, assuming that I would WANT to; assuming I could remember any titles or authors or what songs the songfics were based on (lol j/k, it was Sarah McLachlan); assuming I could find them again, which presumes that they're even still available anywhere, or will ever be made available again, e.g. on the AO3. And then there's the matter of retroactively bookmarking the stories I saved in pre-delicious times: the thought of having them all together in one neatly-tagged* place is incredibly attractive, but hideously daunting. And at the end of the day, is delicious even the right place for it?
* And THAT'S a whole mess of meta for another day.
crossposted from dreamwidth: read | reply | view comments (
)
View poll: Your personal fanfiction curation habits: describe them to me!
Obviously this poll is limited to my own experiences and knowledge, so I would dearly love to hear about the practices that work for you. Or practices that are no longer working for you! There's also the fact that I myself am exclusively a reader and not a writer of fanfiction. If you're a writer, does that affect your archiving habits? Do you handle your own fic differently? What about saving other fannish works, like art and podfic and vids and meta? I'm especially unfamiliar with fanart communities and their homes on the web, and with vids I very quickly run into the problem of limited disk space. So what do you do?
Here's how my current system is set up: every story I read that I ever want to lay my hands on again, I a) save in html format to my laptop (which subsequently gets backed up to an external drive) and b) bookmark in my delicious account. It's important to me to have both, since anything can disappear from the internet at any moment (sites go down, links break, C&D letters are served, authors pull their work, etc.), but a library in the cloud is, by definition and design, accessible a) to anyone b) from anywhere. Thus, in a perfect world I would have a perfectly redundant system consisting of local, offline electronic copies and the corresponding referral links to the online versions of those stories.
But (spoiler!) it isn't a perfect world, and this is how things actually shake out:
As of this moment I have approximately 7,700 stories saved to my hard drive (and backed up on an external drive), a number that wildly underrepresents the amount of fanfiction I have actually read, even just counting the stuff I have read and loved. I first discovered "fandom" and fanfiction via Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the summer of 1998 and read exclusively and extensively in it (Buffy/Angel omg! and AOL! and web rings!) until 2001. And yet I only have, let me count . . . ONE Buffy story saved to my hard drive, and it was posted three months ago. At the time, I kept browser bookmarks of my favorite sites in my AOL account, but that was on my parents' computer, and they were lost to the ether when that machine failed. In the meantime, I had gone off to college with my own computer.
I first started saving stories some time toward the end of 2002, well after I'd discovered (simultaneously) Smallville and slash and livejournal (and fandom again, but for real this time), but I didn't have a saving policy, something helpful and exhaustive like "save every story that you might ever want to lay your hands on again". Over the next couple of years I read what probably amounted to thousands of stories across a whole bunch of fandoms (especially Smallville, popslash, Sports Night, Highlander, Due South, The Sentinel, Lotrips, and Harry Potter), but I saved a vanishingly small percentage of it all. During the summer of 2002 I tore through the entire (now defunct) Our Boys Sorkinfic archive but saved zero stories from it. As of one month ago (I've since had a renaissance!), I had only nine Highlander stories saved. NINE. I started saving scrupulously (using the above-mentioned policy) somewhere in or around 2004, when I was into Harry Potter for at least the second time around (the Remus/Sirius redux), Star Trek (TOS), and M*A*S*H.
By the end of 2005 (SGA, et al.) I had created my delicious account, and by early 2006 I was using it in fits and starts; it wasn't until three years later, in January of 2009 (Merlin), that I began bookmarking scrupulously-that is, bookmarking every story I saved. I have approximately 3,200 stories bookmarked there now, less than half the number of stories I have saved offline; but I have another couple of thousand unread stories bookmarked, to keep my number of open browser tabs to a minimum, and for rainy days.
At this point I don't know if I'm ever going to attempt to gather all those stories I read but never saved, assuming that I would WANT to; assuming I could remember any titles or authors or what songs the songfics were based on (lol j/k, it was Sarah McLachlan); assuming I could find them again, which presumes that they're even still available anywhere, or will ever be made available again, e.g. on the AO3. And then there's the matter of retroactively bookmarking the stories I saved in pre-delicious times: the thought of having them all together in one neatly-tagged* place is incredibly attractive, but hideously daunting. And at the end of the day, is delicious even the right place for it?
* And THAT'S a whole mess of meta for another day.
crossposted from dreamwidth: read | reply | view comments (
)