Discovered in the Bleak Midwinter - January 2

Jan 02, 2018 23:53

Happy New Year to all. May 2018 bring us good things, and "may the world be kind to you", and your loved ones, particularly if 2017 was tough going ( Read more... )

kwsmidwinter, bleakmidwinter, kws

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Comments 27

byslantedlight January 2 2018, 14:25:04 UTC
What an excellent resource - and epic work, as well! Useful and interesting to see what was posted where (some of which I suspect is connected to which authors were active in fandom when, for instance) - and that three of my fics aren't saved to any other archive (when I specifically thought that one was, in fact).

Of course some of them are saved elsewhere - any that were posted to lj challenges or communities, for instance, are probably still there.Though the trick is finding them, of course. I've tried to index discoveredinalj and ci5hq under authors and titles, but I strongly suspect there are gaps...

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kiwisue January 2 2018, 14:43:28 UTC
The initial work was in making the lists. CA was easy (run a blank search all); proslib already has an index; Hatstand wasn't too hard, the hard work for AutoHatstand was downloading the files which I wanted to do anyway, giving them useful names, I could then do a command prompt listing of the save directory.

AO3 was the bugger. 2600+ fics, 20 fics per page, clean up each and every page. I asked them if there was a report that could be run - apparently not. I got quite quick at it thankfully, but the numbers are relatively low now. That's how I twigged there was a problem with Angel in the Dark - there was one less fic than I thought there should be, given additions that I saw in the fandom search and RSS feed, and went searching for info...

I did think about the lj comms, there is probably a mass of fic there that hasn't been uploaded - of course some of it would have been edited and then uploaded too - are the gaps because you aren't sure every entry was tagged?

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byslantedlight January 2 2018, 14:51:23 UTC
Yeah, various people just never sent their stuff to archives, or said "later" in the archiving header, and never did (I suspect I've been guilty of the latter myself - but then I do tend to archive myself too).

The suspected gaps in my comm indexes are just because I suspect I got so far with tagging, either backwards or forwards, and then paused for a break and might not always have got back to finish. I need to go back through the posts from scratch and check the tags - and I will when I have time... *g*

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kiwisue January 2 2018, 14:59:29 UTC
Oh, I definitely know some of mine are in that lot. Time to clean up my act!

DIALJ's probably got the most actual fic. Then there's the journal that you and Josey used to give prompts like the geography challenge, with the results on individual lj's. At least I can say 'Sleeping on the Beach' and some of the others are archived.

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merentha13 January 2 2018, 15:14:38 UTC
Thank you for this! A great resource that must have taken a lot of work. This is really appreciated!

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kiwisue January 2 2018, 15:22:30 UTC
I'm lucky that I have a reasonable amount of Excel experience. So I can turn text into columns easily (I can see even more ways to clean that up now). I can run look up tables of one listing against another. Apart from keeping up with AO3, the thing that takes time is manually checking the "no" responses. Extra/end spaces in titles, "The" and "A" as first or last word, ellipses of 3 or 4 dots, different pseuds, & for and - the list is rather long *g*. I'm sure what I've done is not perfect, but I will keep working on it.

Thanks!

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unbelievable2 January 2 2018, 15:52:43 UTC

Hard work! Thank you!
I must admit I have had huge trouble with Circuit Archive recently - so much so I thought it was my kit and stopped even bothering to try. I didnt realise there were known  problems. :(

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kiwisue January 2 2018, 16:27:29 UTC
There were comments about the down time at prosfinder and a couple of other journals. As the maintainer has been incommunicado for years it is impossible to know exactly what is going on. However my experience is that the archive is up most of the time, and extended down time is likely to coincide with weekends and holidays. This fits in with the scenario of an archive based on a good but outdated open source system that the maintainer keeps working on to fix bugs. Some elements such as author contact details haven't worked for ages.

Over five years old now, so bear that in mind while reading:
http://the-safehouse.livejournal.com/1272533.html

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msmoat January 2 2018, 16:34:37 UTC
Wow! What a tremendous service you've done for the Pros community. Thank you!

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kiwisue January 3 2018, 00:39:50 UTC
Well I think it should be useful in tandem with other efforts. Perhaps we can reignite an awareness that saving and sharing fic is for the community, as well as one's individual library.

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shooting2kill January 2 2018, 16:49:12 UTC
Talk about a (very useful) labour of love! Well done and many thanks.

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kiwisue January 3 2018, 00:44:37 UTC
I hope it's useful, thanks!

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