Uploading Document

[_midoriko_sama_]

Title
Uploading Document

Short, concise description of the ideaI am on several author communities, and since most of my stories reach up to 13,000 words and over, they won't fit in a normal LJ entry. Now I neither have a site nor am I computer savvy. I was thinking that anything in the form resembling a yahoo briefcase would be ideal for authors,

Comments

[kateshort]

Most people just break their stories into shorter chapters and then post a list linking to all of the chapter entries.

Storage space is appealing, though.

[ex_uniquewo]

Most people just break their stories into shorter chapters and then post a list linking to all of the chapter entries.

+1 Or a link to the next chapter at the bottom of the entry. My carpal tunnel really likes that.

[_midoriko_sama_]

*wiggles aching wrist* Hear hear.

[intrepia]

I agree that it would be nice if we could use our LJ storage space for more types of files.

[imc]

Related suggestion: story posting

I should think any proposal for an extra paid feature would have to go past the bean-counters, and they'd want to know that enough people are going to buy the service to make it worthwhile. This does sound like a minority interest to me so I doubt they would go for it.

[_midoriko_sama_]

Oh! erm... thanks for spotting that and warning me about it. Its the first time I've ever put a suggestion up, so I don't really know how it works.

[imc]

These are just my opinions by the way, they don't carry any actual weight. :-)

[cmshaw]

Hmm. While I'm all for anything that would encourage people to stop posting stories in chapters (those suckers are really hard to download and reformat for ebook reading), I'm not sure encouraging non-web-format posting is a good alternative for a web-based blogging service (most people can open current Word documents now, for example -- but what about in five years? I wouldn't know what to do with a XYWrite document today, for example).

[_midoriko_sama_]

I personally hate the whole notion of splitting up entries... it just clogs the system up. I have a couple of lucky blokes for friends who opened geocities sites and managed to make heads or tails of the gargantuan system. They just save their word documents as web pages and upload them, then put up a link on the community, and voila! Story in thirty seconds. But I'm a right dunce - I've tried, even very hard and with an 'html for idiots' guide, but I kept forgetting stuff and getting it all wrong, so much so that finally I gave up.

An easy solution would probably the Web Page option.. even though you have a different version of word, I've found, you can always open a document saved in web page format with a browser, no matter the version. I have stories dating back to the '96 that are still going strong on my newest Mozilla

[pbristow]

[NODS] Yep, this would be a lot more useful to some of us than picture storage, and probably wouldn't need nearly so much of LJ's resources to implement.

It needn't be limited to documents either, although LJ/6A might want to impose some restrictions on what types of file are stored for security and liability reasons (i.e. no executables, or other likely virus-containers). Just a modest quantity of space per user (with the option to buy more if needed) in which they can store files, and easily or automatically link to them from their journals. Sensible size limits, with advice on moving to one of the commercial file-hosting services if you need something bigger. (Do 6A already own a file hosting service, I wonder?)

[_midoriko_sama_]

I was thinking of something like a yahoo briefcase format. If I could get that to work, anyone could, so I think it would be pretty straighforward for anyone, and darn right comfy for long-winded lasses like me who write over 1300 words in one sitting.

[adudeabides]

Should be implemented into ScrapBook.

[hakeber]

I agree with this. Especially seeing as most of the text files in question would only be a fraction of the size of the average picture file. Then it would just be a matter of determining what file types would be allowed.

[adudeabides]

Agreed on file-size. Besides, scrabooks contain more than images, and since there's already partial support for video, this would be a natural extension.

My suggestions...

* Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)
* Adobe PostScript (ps)
* Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
* Lotus WordPro (lwp)
* MacWrite (mw)
* Microsoft Excel (xls)
* Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
* Microsoft Word (doc)
* Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
* Microsoft Write (wri)
* Rich Text Format (rtf)
* Text (ans, txt)

[hakeber]

This sounds like a very good list. And you are quite right. A real life scrapbook includes all manner of things from newspaper clipping to ribbons won at a county fair to stickers bought at the store. Certainly this is much more than just photos (just photos would be a photo album, not a scrapbook.)