argh

[ratcreature]

Why do so many automated archives only have the archive name in the page title of stories, not the story name? That sucks for bookmarking. I'm usually too lazy to rename my bookmarks, and most times it isn't a problem. Most commonly I bookmark stories I come across that looked interesting for later reading, and I can just go to the site again, even if the bookmark title is somewhat cryptic. But every once in a while it happens that I go back to a story later (sometimes several weeks later or even longer), only it vanished from the archive, and then I have no idea what the title or the author was, and can't even look whether the story might be archived elsewhere. Gah.

Well, I guess I'll never know now what that story in my HP to-read bookmark folder was, since I have only the archive name and the cryptic database generated URL, that's no hint either.

Comments

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I'm so with you on this. As a reccer, I end up going everywhere to look for things, and I was thrilled when fanfiction.net started including the story names; it made my life much simpler.

[ratcreature]

It's just so frustrating that I know that there was a story I found interesting, but now I can't even reconstruct what its title or author was, and not having read it yet I can't even ask around with details on a storyfinder community. And I mean, I bookmark lots of stories in many fandoms, and try to browse around for stuff from people not on my f-list, so it's not as if I have all the titles or even likely authors in my head.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Any idea how they managed that? I've been thinking of starting up a personal archive for a bit, and definitely want to sidestep this issue, as it drives me mad as well...

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I know almost less than nothing about coding (the fact that I can format and upload my own stories to my own website is a constant mystery to me *g*)

But if you know something about code, you could just go to one of ff.net's pages and view the source codes. It would look like gibberish to me, but luckily not everybody's such a Luddite.

[ratcreature]

Web pages created by such archive scripts are normal html, since the scripts of the archive system run on the server. For example I generate the headers of my personal site with PHP so that I can change certain things in one place and don't have to edit them manually on every page (like for example navigation bars, my email address, simple stuff), but if you save any webpage from my site you won't see the PHP code but it looks to the browser just as if I had coded it manually. That is because when the browser calls a php page on the server it is executed there and the webserver sends the output of that php page to you, which is a html document.

[ratcreature]

I have never set up an automated system like efiction, but I suspect there are some out there that you can customize so that the page titles are automatically generated. I mean, you can just use the software of an archive that does that, for example on skyehawke the story title is there, not just the archive name, though I think they adapted the software specifically for their site. Of course you can also fiddle with the scripts yourself provided they are open source, or ask around on archivist support groups and such for installation tips and help.

However I noticed lots of efiction based archives have that problem so I suspect the standard installation might be with some kind of static header that you customize once, not one that is generated from the database for each story.

For a personal fanfic archive it might be more practical to use a publishing system like wordpress, since you probably don't need the account and community features of large fanfic archive systems (like email notifications, multiple users with the ability to edit their stories...)

[quivo.livejournal.com]

That's what I was thinking as well - I've been nosing around wordpress for a while with that idea in mind.

ETA (good lord this comment form sat waaay too long on my screen): Am going to do it the WordPress way now, with a new host and everything. *crosses fingers*

[catmoran.livejournal.com]

It's a real long shot, but have you tried googling on the url? It's vaguely possible that you'll hit a google cache page for the story, and a little more likely that you'll hit someone's rec page for the story with the title and author's name.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I tried that. No luck. I think often these archives are set up not to be indexed by robots, and in any case these pages in archives with a database are in my experience less likely to be indexed, since especially with HP usually there's at least a javascript content warning and/or age confirmation click box set between any author pages or search results and the actual story display, if it's not password protected.